


Lowering Our Coffins

by remsha_miar



Category: Naruto
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Death, Eventual Smut, Hate to Love, I borrow canon when I need it, Immortality, Jashinism, Loneliness, M/M, Minor Original Character(s), Murder, Nightmares, Not Canon Compliant, Romance, Sad, Slow Burn, Trauma, i guess, so much kissing towards the end jfc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:34:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 22
Words: 66,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26918206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remsha_miar/pseuds/remsha_miar
Summary: For the longest time Hidan has wandered the Land of Hot Water as a vagabond, exiled from his village that refuses to deal with his cruelty any longer but is unable to kill him. That is until he is recruited for the Akatsuki and finds that he isn't the only immortal in the world. Kakuzu is abrasive, miserly and stronger than him but Hidan is drawn to him anyways. Here is a man who possibly can understand him. While running missions together they not only find that they are able to work well together but also unravel the pasts that led them to where they are now.
Relationships: Hidan/Kakuzu (Naruto)
Comments: 97
Kudos: 150





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> It's 2020 and I'm writing Kakuhida fanfiction. Anyways, this whole project turned out longer than I expected but I have every intention of finishing it. Over the course of it I took liberties with their powers, Hidan's in particular, and didn't take canon too much into account.
> 
> I hope you enjoy the read!

He‘s done it so many times by now that he would have thought it would become boring one of these days. That he would grow tired of it. The praying, following the commendments. Reciting all the psalms in his head before every kill. The day never came, though.

It is certainly the more boring part of the ritual but the pay off makes it worth it every time. Having all the blood rush through him, accelerated, exciting, burning through his veins and rushing hot through his body. That is worth all the trouble he had to go through to get it. The sweetest part of it all is the last hit. Fingers tightly wrapped around his spear he rams it through his chest, pain exploding from his heart, shooting through his limbs and then it all stopped.

_That‘s it._

For a wonderful, sweet moment the pain was all there was, tingling in his fingers and almost bringing tears to his eyes from just how good it felt.

To experience death – the death of another person- feeling the stopping of the heart, causing it, that is the best part of it all. It makes his mouth twitch into an unstable grin, eyes rolling back.

_That‘s it, that‘s it, that‘s it._

_Fuck._

The other‘s body falls to the ground, the sound snapping Hidan out of his ecstacy, and stays there lifelessly. Some non-believer shinobi from Yugakure. Chunin or jonin, not that it mattered much.

He pulls the spear from his chest, wiping the blood on his trousers, watches his skin return to normal. His legs are slightly wobbly from pleasure when he takes the first step out of Jashin‘s diagram. With one foot he turns the dead shinobi on his back. There‘s dirt in the man‘s face, the bloody cut on his forehead where Hidan‘s scythe had reached him, and a dark red spot soaking his shirt now.

Hidan clicks his tongue. That guy hadn‘t even put up a fight, spat water and threw letter bombs as though that could hurt Hidan in any way. He kicks him in the side for good measure.

"For interrupting my ritual.“

The clearing is quiet now. There‘s no more shinobi waiting in the shadows and in the trees to ambush him. All that had been hiding he had taken care of. Not even a dozen of them. Some pinned to the trees, the group that Hidan had wanted to conduct his ritual with until he was interrupted by another one. He had cut most of them down with just his scythe, not bothering to steal their blood. With a larger number of opponents that would be too inconvenient, but with the last one he had taken his time.

Reaching for his necklace, he recites prayers to himself, offering all the souls of the dead to Jashin, and leaves behind the clearing filled with corpses.

Come morning, they would start to smell in the sun and by then he wants to be far away from this place. But for now the moon is still shining bright in the sky between the tree lines and once he finds the road again, he continues walking.

The Land of Hot Water has an unremarkable landscape, at least in these parts. It‘s just flat land covered in woods with trees of the same height, it‘s uncanny. Far from his favourite place to be.

Heathens. All of them.

They all deserve to die.

He comes past a sign at the side of the road showing a map of the land and its biggest roads. A red dot marks his location and according to the symbols on the map he‘s not far away from the next village.

Not that he will set a foot in it. He leaves the road again, goes for the woods to seek out another small clearing that he can rest at without being attacked again. He finds a spot. It‘s not a clearing but a indentation between a collection of trees that had grown particularly close to each other. Their crowns built a roof that looked water proof – you never know in these parts, the rain comes and goes unpredictably – and the moss looked soft enough for Hidan to spend a night on it. It isn‘t like he‘d die from a cold anyway.

He doesn‘t fall asleep right away, never does. Instead he feels for his necklace and mumbles prayers. Asks for a fruitful day the next day. For more souls to sacrifice to his god. He repeats his prayer as many times as it takes for him to drift off and his dreams are blood and sweet death.

He doesn‘t know what wakes him up. The crunch of leaves being crushed somewhere. The breeze of sharp movement. Or just the feeling of someone staring. Maybe all of it, but he is awake within the blink of an eye – just in time to dodge the kunai flying for his head. It gets stuck in the wood next to his ear. The next moment, Hidan is standing and throwing his scythe in the direction of the attack, controlling its movement with a tight grip on the cable.

It crashes into a tree and sends splinters flying. A pained shout comes from the man falling out of the twigs and branches, raining leaves down with him. With a thud he lands on his head, blood pouring over the roots of the trees.

Hidan sighs.

Unlucky.

When he gets closer to examine the body, he notices that the man is still alive. His headband shows the symbol of Yugakure, now soaking through with blood, and he keeps one eye tightly shut with more blood drying on his brow. He has an old scar on his chin, barely covered by blond stubble.

"Hey.“ Hidan squats down next to him. "Wanna convert to Jashinism?“

The man‘s eyes widen with shock. He stutters out something unintelligeble. Hidan catches his hand going to grab for another kunai from his pocket, and with some added pressure breaks the shinobi‘s fingers.

"Fucker,“ Hidan spits out and with his free hand punches the man in the face, knocking his head against the tree root again. It makes for an ugly crack and the man‘s eyes go white now.

Hidan prays that his soul will go to Jashin and thanks him for the kill.

Gathering his belongings from his makeshift resting place between the trees, Hidan turns his back on this place too. The sun is rising over the trees now and the leaves are still wet with morning dew. The wetness is in his clothes, makes it stick to him uncomfortably and cold. He‘ll have to scavenge for a set of new clothes again some time soon and also find a hot spring to wash himself, one that he could use without being interrupted by another group of Yugarkure‘s useless ninja corps. He smells, he‘s dirty, he‘s drenched with dew and sticky with blood that isn‘t all just his own.

He makes his way through the woods and back to the road.

When it comes into view he‘s not alone there. Travellers stand around the road sign next to the woods. They‘re a small group, only a trio.

He breaks out of the woods and for a moment they all stare at each other.

These people are not travellers, that is the first realisation. Their coats were the same, black with red clouds sewn onto them. The symbols on their headbands are all crossed through like his own. One of them, a tall man who has most of his face covered by a mask, carries a bingo book in his hand and Hidan sees his own face on the opened page.

"Who the fuck are you?“

The man shuts his book and tugs it away inside his coat. His eyes are the only visible part of his face; they’re striking, green and what should be white is a dark red like a corpse’s eyes. There’s an angry crease between his brows as he fixes his gaze on Hidan. Before he can make any move, his comrade stops him with an outstretched hand. It’s a woman. She looks kept together, her hair neatly arranged and when she speaks her voice is friendly but stern all the same.

“We’ve been looking for an associate of ours,” she says, “Maybe you have seen him. His name is Satoshi. “

Hidan shrugs. “Don’t know him.” Something clicks. “Oh, blond hair, scar here.” He points at his chin.

The woman nods.

He shoulders his scythe and leans in the direction of the woods. “Saw him somewhere there, yeah.”

The woman nods at the third person in their little party. He’s a young man with dark hair and a serious face. Too serious and also weirdly detached in the way he looks at Hidan, like he doesn’t care about him at all. Following the woman’s gestures, he leaves for the woods, the same way Hidan has just come from. He’s fast at that. Gone in the blink of an eye.

“So you’re-?”

“We are members of Akatsuki,” the woman explains.

“That mercenary group?”

The woman continues without answering him. “Lord Yugakure asked of us to hunt down the man that plagues the villages of the land and interrupts the peace of the country.”

Hidan clicks his tongue.

“Your bounty are thirty million ryo,” the man says. His voice is deep and rough, but Hidan doesn’t have the time to appreciate it. From the man’s coat his arm shoots forward, separated from the rest of his body and only tied to it by thick dark strings.

The next thing is pain exploding in his stomach, just below his ribs, and his clothes tear as the man’s closed fist strikes right through him. Blood rises in his throat and runs down the corners of his mouth. Hidan doesn’t fall, stays on his feet and keeps a tight grip around his scythe.

For a moment he lets himself enjoy the taste of metal in his mouth before he spits out the blood. “That hurt, bastard!”

Another jolt of pain goes through them as the man retracts his arm and the strings and fist rub past the wound again. His own blood pools at his feet.

“Fucking- _ow!_ ”

The man’s hand drips blood as the strings disappear inside his sleeve. He looks at it, then at Hidan. The crease between his brows has vanished and while Hidan can’t read his expression under the mask, he thinks it’s something like shock, maybe awe. Akatsuki were mercenaries, surely they didn’t share the same fear of the unknown as the people of this country.

“So the rumours are true,” the woman says calmly, “You truly are immortal.”

Hidan wipes his mouth, grips his scythe and charges.

The woman retreats immediately, seeking safety up in the nearest tree. Hidan doesn’t care. She’s not his target. The man stays where he is, watching Hidan come closer.

He swings his scythe.

Hits the road sign and it splinters apart.

Swiftly he retrieves his scythe from the broken wood and turns around. Fucking bastard dodged.

He only sees the movement from the corner of his eye, then hard knuckles connect with his face. The punch rattles through his head and sends him flying back a few feet. He lands hard on the road, swallowing a mouthful of dust.

“Too bad,” the man taunts.

Hidan hits the ground once and gets up again, scythe securely in his hand. Charges again.

The man’s hand detaches itself again, faster than Hidan can dodge, and digs itself into Hidan’s chest again with brute force. He can’t breathe for several seconds and falls to his knees. Black and white spots dance before his eyes. He shakes his head. It takes conscious effort not to pass out from how good this feels. With a shaking hand he grabs the strings growing from his chest, connecting the detached hand with its owner. He drops the scythe, opts for a kunai and slices a deep cut across the man’s palm.

The man flinches and pulls his hand back. Hidan takes the moment to breathe again and with the soles of his shoes starts drawing Jashin’s symbol onto the road, his own pooling blood his paint.

“You better watch out who you’re messing with, bastard!” he shouts at the man, “I’ll punish you in Lord Jashin’s name.”

He licks the man’s blood from the kunai’s blade. It tastes different, like metal and even more like earth, dry. Hidan watches his skin turn black, watches the white markings appear on the back of his hands and breaks out into laughter. It shakes his ribs painfully, makes his fingers tremble as he searches for the retractable spear in his pocket. Eventually he finds it, barely manages to hold it steady from anticipation.

“Watch this!”

He rams the spear straight through his heart. Had it been anyone else, he would have toyed with them some more, but that masked freak had already landed multiple hits on him. The thrill of his blood flow stopping sets it shortly after, makes his eyes roll back. Staying conscious is hard but he wills himself to watch his opponent.

In the safety of her tree the woman watches with interest more than anything else.

The man clutches at his chest, eyes wide in surprise, and he sputters some words. His legs buckle but he doesn’t go down. A pulsing mass starts building on his shoulder under his coat. It creeps down his arm and then a collective of dark strings, some as thick as cables, drip down to the ground, almost liquid like they were molten by something. It keeps dripping down until the puddle on the ground has reached the size of a man and it keeps going. Lastly the shards of a broken wooden mask drop from the man’s sleeve and land on the puddle where they keep swimming. The man scowls down at them, then straightens his posture and rolls his shoulders.

“How unfortunate,” he growls.

“Why the fuck are you still alive?” Hidan retorts. His skin changes back to normal again. The procedure had worked, so why wasn’t the guy dead yet?

“I’m gonna kill you.”

“You can fucking try!” Hidan picks up his scythe and points it at the guy, challenging.

Before anyone of them can make the first move, the woman comes down from her tree, gracefully landing between the two of them. “Enough! Hidan. Kakuzu.” She shoots the both of them a sharp look. “We haven’t come here for this.”

Hidan spits out a mouthful of blood as his insides start to arrange themselves around the healing wounds. “What are you talking about?”

The woman turns her attention fully to him. “We would like you to join our organisation.”

Hidan bursts out laughing.

No one laughs with him.

“Wait, you serious?”

Under the mask the other man – Kakuzu, the woman called him – makes some kind of displeased grimace.

The woman takes a deep breath. She’s far too patient for the situation. “Akatsuki aims to gather the strongest forces of all countries and become the most powerful organisation of mercenaries in the world. It is our mission to bring peace to the world.”

She sounds so solemn saying her speech that it almost makes the laughter bubble up in his throat again.

“I already have a mission,” he says instead, “I want to spread my religion and the way of Jashin.”

“This is ridiculous.” Kakuzu crosses his arms without any regard towards Hidan’s blood on his hands smearing his clothes. “We need the money of his bounty more than we need him.”

“Hey!” Hidan wants to say more but the third man of the Akatsuki’s group returns from the woods then, the blond man slung over his shoulder. Kakuzu looks at him and then back at the woman with raised brows like the sight proves his point.

“Itachi, what happened to him?” the woman asks.

The man carefully places the dead body against a tree trunk. “He was already dead when I found him.”

Hidan throws his hands in the air. “He attacked me.”

The woman and Itachi exchange a look and something in their eyes shifts around as though they’re having a whole conversation just through looks. It lasts for a second and Itachi nods in understanding. “We’re recruiting him.”

“Hey, I already said no,” Hidan protests.

“The Akatsuki are mercenaries,” the woman says, “Our missions are assassinations, skirmishes and war. As long as you fulfill your duty, there’s nothing standing in your way to spread your religion. Additionally, you will enjoy the protection of the organisation while you are on missions.”  
Hidan stares at the three of them and the dead body. He’s been living on the road for the most part, catching anyone who came to close to him. None of them had wanted to join the way of Jashin with him. He usually avoided bigger villages; he wouldn’t be able to get any sleep at all when residing in them with Yugakure’s ninjas on his heels.

Maybe it really was time to leave the Land of Hot Water.

“Decide already,” Kakuzu grumbles.

Hidan’s eyes stay on him. He’s a strange thing to look at. Hidan’s killed him, has felt him die and yet the man is still breathing. It’s pissing him off.

“Fine,” he says.

A slight smile flies across the woman’s face but it’s gone as fast as it came.

Hidan puts his weapons away and shoulders his scythe. “But I’m only doing it to spread my religion.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edit: since I posted this: I made a [tumblr](https://remshamiar.tumblr.com/)


	2. Chapter Two

“I can’t believe I was partnered with you.”

Hidan huffs out an annoyed breath and makes a point of not looking at Kakuzu. “Feeling’s mutual, asshole.”

They’re going south, having crossed the border between the Land of Hot Water and the Land of Fire just a few days ago.

“Here I was praying to Lord Jashin to be partnered up with anyone but you,” Hidan continues, “Fucking heathen.”

Kakuzu’s kick hits him right in the ribs and sends him flying off the road and against the nearest tree. His bones crack and splinters dig into his back as he slides down the tree trunk. “Ow!”

“I’m gonna beat you to death,” Kakuzu growls, though by now Hidan knows that his voice is just that low.

Hidan wipes bloody spit from his mouth with the back of his hand. “Just fucking try! See how it goes.” When he gets up the restructuring of his ribs sends pangs of pain through his body. The cuts on his back close and leave behind only the grime and dirt from weeks on the road.

Kakuzu clicks his tongue and nods in the direction of the road. “You complain too much. Hurry up.”

“Fuck you! I was following you the whole time.” Hidan catches up to him but makes sure to stay out of reach – not that it would matter, Kakuzu is much faster than him. “Where are we going anyway?”

“Kirigakure.”

“To do what?”

“There’s a civil war going on. The land’s been building bridges to connect with the Land of Fire and a lot of people apparently didn’t like that. They built a resistance group and we’re supposed to take them down.”

The last of his bones crack back into place and Hidan stretches. “Sounds exciting.”

Kakuzu reaches inside his coat and flips a few pages in his bingo book. When he finds the right page he holds it up for Hidan to see. The man on the wanted poster looks ordinary with short buzzed hair and a scowling expression. The only thing that is not ordinary is the scar running across his face from his right eye brow to the left corner of his mouth.

“Kurosame,” he reads the name out loud.

“That’s the resistance’s leader. He’s our target.”

“Okay?” Hidan looks at Kakuzu for the first time since they were sent on their mission. “You sound like you have something to add.”

Kakuzu spares him an annoyed glance and this time it’s him who turns away from Hidan first. “It has nothing to do with you.”

Hidan shrugs. He’ll figure that out when the time comes, then. Not that he really even cares in the first place. If that man was a target, he had someone to kill and that was everything he needed to know.

That evening is the first night they spent in an inn. It was small and shabby, located at the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, with only a small hundred-people-village down the slope of a hill. Its lights shine up to his room’s window.

“Two rooms,” Kakuzu said, “I don’t need to see your face all the time.”

“Fuck you too,” Hidan retorted and now he finds himself alone in a small room with only a bed and a table. The only plus is that he has his own bathroom and while it’s even smaller than the main room, he’s grateful for it.

The first thing he does is to run himself a warm bath, rid himself of all his torn clothes and soak in the water. He’s never much indulged in the hot springs of Yugakure but during the last few months he’s missed them. Being wanted meant that he could barely stay at any inns and so he sought out hideouts in the woods. It came with all the disadvantages. Torn clothes, grime that wouldn’t wash off by only bathing in rivers, and exposure to the elements. The cold nights or the forces of nature wouldn’t be enough to kill him, but it didn’t change the fact that it was unpleasant.

Finally being able to take a hot bath and properly clean himself, makes him feel human again. Scrubbing his skin and rinsing his hair somehow feels purifying.

He towels off and lets himself flop down on his bed. It’s a horrible mattress, stiff and worn, but right now it’s better than anything he’s had to endure until now. He’s tempted to fall asleep right then and there.

The door to his room opens and Kakuzu comes in, looking at the bingo book. He stops in his tracks when he notices Hidan raising a brow at him.

“Do you mind?”

“You really have no shame.”

“Says the man who came in without even knocking.”

Kakuzu digs into his bag and throws a coat at him, one of the black ones with the red cloud symbol of the Akatsuki. “Cover up.”

Hidan sits up, draws the coat over his lap and deems that enough. Kakuzu rolls his eyes at him.

“I thought you don’t need to see my face all the time.” Hidan rests his chin on his hand, elbow on his knees.

Kakuzu settles down at the table and rummages through his bag once more. The second thing he hands Hidan is a ring, similar to the one he wears himself. “Wear it.”

“What is it? Presents for new members?”

“They connect us to the leader.”

“Whatever.”

“We need to talk.”

It’s Hidan’s turn to roll his eyes. “I thought you just barged in to see me naked for no reason.”

“I admit that bath made you easier to look at.”

“Pervert,” Hidan deadpans. It’s something he’s well aware of. He doesn’t look bad, it’s just that his handsomeness is mostly covered up by dirt and blood. “Spit it out. What the fuck do you want? It’s late and I’m tired.”

Kakuzu pushes the bingo book across the table for Hidan. “I want you to learn Kurosame’s profile, so you know who we’re up against.”

“That’s all?” Hidan takes the book and flips a few pages before going back to their target’s. Lots of people from lots of villages. “Can’t that wait until we get there?”

“The other thing is your immortality,” Kakuzu says.

“What about it?”

“How does it work? What are its limits? Everything. We’re supposed to work as a team after all even if we both don’t like it.”

Hidan shrugs. “I kill people for Lord Jashin and in exchange he grants me immortality.”

“That’s it?”

“Pretty much. Yeah.” There isn’t much too it. Phrases and prayers that he needs to do but they aren’t relevant for Kakuzu to know. It is just the way it works.

“I was talking to Itachi,” Kakuzu says and Hidan almost cringes at how serious he sounds, “We both understand how your way of killing works. You need the blood of your opponent to turn yourself in a living voodoo doll, essentially. But neither me nor him understand how your immortality works, and if even Itachi doesn’t understand, it is worrying.”

“I just told you how it works. Maybe this is something new even for this Itachi guy. I _am_ the only one that Lord Jashin deemed worthy of his gift after all.”

Kakuzu shakes his head slightly. “Moving on to the limits.”

“Don’t really have any. I’ve survived everything so far. Got stabbed, burnt, stabbed again. Some Yugakure shinobi managed to catch me once and tried to starve me for two months but that didn’t work either. I got weaker and all that, but I was nowhere close to dying. I escaped when they tried stabbing again.”

“Are you sure it’s your god that is protecting you?”

Hidan leans forward to take up as much of Kakuzu’s field of view as he can. “Yes, I am. He blessed me. Not that a non-believer like you would understand.”

It takes visible effort for Kakuzu to ignore that remark. Hidan watches it flash through his eyes. “You won’t die from mortal injuries nor starvation.”

“Yeah. No limits. Not that I know anyway. Maybe there’s something super extreme that hasn’t happened yet and could kill me but...” He fades off and leans back to stare at the ceiling for a while. Only from the corners of his eyes he notices Kakuzu take notes on a wrinkled piece of paper.

“Speaking of, what about you?”

Kakuzu looks up at him.

“I killed you. My ritual back then, that should have killed you, but you’re immortal too, right?” He doesn’t care much for Kakuzu himself, but their encounter has been on his mind ever since it happened. The thought that there was someone else like him in the world was equally relieving and terrifying, and he needed to know how that other person had achieved it.

“I wouldn’t call it that.”

“You were the one who said we’re supposed to be a team. I should get to know about your abilities too,” Hidan insists. The room is getting colder the more he cools off, the tiredness making it worse and he wants to finally go to sleep. But if this is a conversation they have to have, he can finish it too.

“It’s a Forbidden Technique that allows me to integrate other people’s hearts into my own body and extend my lifespan.”

Hidan nods in understanding.

Kakuzu gets up again. “Read the target’s profile,” he reminds Hidan again and turns to leave. Hidan watches the door close and listens to his footsteps outside disappear until he hears another door open and close. Hidan sighs and gets up to lock his door properly. The bingo book still lies open on the table with Kurosame’s page open.

Hidan goes to sleep without looking at it much longer. Who cares what the man’s abilities are if none of them would be able to kill him anyway?

He dreams of blood-soaked clothes and faces contorted into grimaces of terror, screaming and yet not making any sound.

***

Kakuzu doesn’t sleep immediately. Without his bingo book to decide what bounties to chase next, he instead mulls over what they have just talked about. What Itachi said still plays in the back of his mind. He doesn’t like the man but he’s reliable when it comes to evaluating other people’s abilities. They both understand how Hidan kills. What they don’t understand is how Hidan doesn’t kill himself in the process.

True immortality doesn’t exist. Even Kakuzu’s multiple hearts are just a flawed way of going about it and he needs to be careful. He can’t allow himself the same nonchalance that Hidan apparently has.

He can’t get the topic out of his head. It shouldn’t be possible for something like flawless immortality to exist.

***

Hidan startles awake at the sound of hard thumps against wood, and for the few moments it takes to understand where he is, his heart races with anticipation of an opponent. No, he’s still in his bed, in his room of the inn, and the thumps is Kakuzu knocking at his door.

“Get up. We’re leaving!” His voice is muffled through the door.

“Yeah, yeah,” Hidan calls back. Outside the window the sun shines. He’s more rested than ever before in these last few months. He’s no longer just a vagabond, but a vagabond with the opportunity to sleep in an inn without having to expect another ambush.

He gets dressed, pulls on a pair of trousers and one of his most torn shirts – it can suffer a little more and he won’t have to sacrifice his least torn shirts yet – and wraps himself in the Akatsuki coat. It’s comfortable, wide, easy to move in. Made to withstand even rougher weather. He decides he likes it.

“About time,” Kakuzu mumbles when he meets him in the hallway.

Hidan clicks his tongue and waves the bingo book.

Kakuzu takes it back. “Did you read up on the target?”

“Yeah, yeah, I did. Let’s fucking go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sooo, the whole immortality thing Hidan has going is pretty important in this.


	3. Chapter Three

The resistance quarters are located in an a village that allied with the rebels. It shows in the ways the people act. The lady at the reception desk of their inn eyes them with suspicion as they apparently do here with everyone who isn’t from Kirigakure. They don’t intend to stay long anyway.

“You been here before?” Hidan asks.

“Be quiet,” Kakuzu hisses back. They’re in the trees, overlooking a fort of tents outside the actual village. It’s an improvised camp, far away from being anything professional, but apparently it’s enough of a threat that Kirigakure sends out Akatsuki members to deal with it. They have fireplaces dotting the perimeter against the dark of the night.

“It’s the middle one,” Hidan says and points at the largest tent of the camp, “That’s where he is for sure.”

“That’s a medical tent.”

Hidan frowns as he watches the guards at the edges of the camp. “He’s their strongest, right? Why not just charge in and draw him out that way?”

“Hidan-”  
  
“I’m serious. It would be the easiest way.”  
  
He’s about to jump from the tree but Kakuzu holds him back. “Over there.” He points towards the western side of the camp. “There he is.”  
  
Hidan squints to find the man. “Good, then let’s go.”  
  
This time he’s jumped off the tree faster than Kakuzu can catch him again and he charges in, one hand on his scythe, the other around his necklace, speaking prayers in his mind. He finishes his psalms right before a kunai hits him in the shoulder. He pulls it back out and throws it right back at the guard it came from, aims for the throat. A wet gurgle and the man is down.  
  
He sees another guard run off to ring an alarm while others gather together and build a formation.  
  
Hidan keeps going, grin tugging at the corners of his mouths. He could offer Jashin a feast tonight. Throwing his scythe mows down a few of them, makes them scatter. He lets the blade dig into the ground and pulls himself closer by the cable, landing in the middle of a group of opponents. Their head bands are notched just like his own, denouncing any loyalty to Kirigakure. Hidan grips his scythe tightly again and takes a swing. Blood sprays from wounds and broad cuts.  
  
Knives fly through the air.  
  
The camp is up in commotion now. Hidan hears calls for backup and Kurosame.  
  
Everyone he’s fighting here is fodder.  
  
A sequence of knives hits him in the back, one digging into him right below his neck. He tastes his own blood in his mouth and then the wound is closing again, pressing the knives out. They fall to the ground. Hidan turns around and finds the shinobi that threw them.  
  
“Fucker, that hurt!” He sends his scythe flying and while the man starts running, he manages to cut him on the arm.  
  
In a hurry, Hidan draws Jashin’s symbol on the ground and licks the man’s blood from the blade. He’s running fast, not that that will protect him. Hidan watches his hands turn black, white patches outlining the bones of his fingers. Reaching for his spear his pulse quickens with excitement. Suppressing the trembling of his hands he stabs his leg first and watches the man stumble to the ground as his leg gives out underneath him. “Yeah, try to run now, asshole,” he hisses through the haze of pain. It feels good, makes him want to do it more.  
  
He doesn’t need to.  
  
Two jonin charge from a row of tents, armed with swords that they ram into him, wedging the blades between his ribs until they jut out of his back again.  
  
They grin at him victoriously.  
  
Hidan returns that grin to them.  
  
Further away the runner lets out some last choked wails and his death washes over Hidan like a lover. “Fuck yes.”  
  
Only the presence of the two jonin keeps him grounded. They let go of their swords and leave them lodged inside Hidan’s torso for him to pull out. Stumbling back, their eyes are wide and deliciously full of fear. One of them tries to scream but before the sound can come out, Hidan slices his throat with his own sword. The other turns on his heels and bolts off. Hidan throws his scythe after him, lets it catch onto the man’s leg and makes him stumble face first into the ground. After a few strides he’s caught up to him and keeps the man down with a foot on the back of his head.  
  
“Killed your friend,” Hidan taunts, “Whoops.”  
  
The man struggles under him. To no avail. Hidan clicks his tongue and kicks him a few times until he hears the satisfying crack of skull against rock.  
  
At the edge of the camp he finds the resistance group reforming themselves, building groups. Someone’s barking orders, other jonin and then a man who looks familiar. The guy he knows from his wanted poster. Kurosame is pointing people around, barking orders above anyone else. Just as Hidan notices him, he notices Hidan as well.  
  
“Water Styles!” he calls.  
  
Hidan ignores that, charges at the man.  
  
A hard wall of ice cold water collides with him and hurls him into the air. In his flight he catches sight of a group of water style users, fingers locked in a hand seal. The hurling through the air ends abruptly. Hidan finds himself floating, surrounded by water. Air bubbles escape his mouth and rise past his eyes. His feet can’t find solid ground. He’s trapped.  
  
“Fuck!” Another burst of air bubbles out of his mouth.  
  
Any sound from outside is muffled now but he makes out the alarmed shouts of “Akatsuki” and “We need to abandon the camp.”  
  
The overall commotion hasn’t ended yet, far from it. He catches sight of the other end of the camping site, though blurred and hard to make it, and sees the earth move. Boulders move and crush more shinobi, choking off their pained shouts. They come closer.  
  
The guards and the other shinobi draw a tight circle around their leader and Hidan’s water prison, build up their defences around those keeping him trapped. The lack of air starts to hurt in Hidan’s lungs.  
  
“There’s two!” he hears someone shout.  
  
Sure enough, Kakuzu breaks through their ranks, faster than Hidan can even see. The next second he appears between the orderly rows of Kurosame’s men and a single punch makes the ground under their feet crumble. Throws them all off-balance. Some let themselves dissolve into water to escape the attack while others fall victim to Kakuzu’s continuous attack on the shinobi, throwing well-aimed punches and kicks while avoiding projectiles like he’s done nothing else in his entire life.  
  
The water prison crumbles, the water sloshing to the ground, and finally Hidan’s free again. He lands on the ground as a drenched heap and immediately he sucks in a large gasp of air, coughing out water. The pain in his chest fades a little. He pushes his hair out of his face, just as Kakuzu appears in front of him. Hidan’s seeing him without his coat for the first time. Underneath Kakuzu’s dark skin is covered in scars, circling his strong arms as though parting them into segments and then continuing to criss-cross all over his muscled shoulders and back.  
  
“Hi,” Hidan says breathlessly.  
  
“Get up!” Kakuzu barks at him. His mask and hood are still on, covering up his face, “I told you not to rush in.”  
  
Hidan stands up, shakes the water from his hair. It’s cold in the night air. His coat hangs heavy from his shoulders. “I took most of them out. What’s the problem?”  
  
His scythe has landed a few feet away and Hidan goes to collect it. Around the crater Kakuzu punched into the ground the commotion is still going on between collapsed tents. The resistance’s shinobi fight other opponents now. Hidan gapes. “What the fuck?”  
  
Large black creatures mow through the camp now, easily double his height and four times as broad. Their movements are fluent as they dodge attacks and retaliate. There’s three of them, all with differently coloured masks giving them some semblance of being humanoid. One with a red mask sucks in a large gulp of breath and spits out fire balls in rapid succession. Water style users build a wall to catch its attacks, and shortly after they’re cut down by a blue-masked creature hissing sharp wind that tears through them and slices apart more of the surrounding tents.  
  
“What the fuck?” Hidan repeats but this time it’s directed at Kakuzu who crosses his arms just as lightning begins to shower down on another group of shinobi, breathed out by yet another masked creature. This with the fire caused by the other mask illuminates the camp and warms the air.  
  
Kakuzu doesn’t give him an explanation and makes his way up the crater again. “Let’s go. We can’t let Kurosame escape.”  
  
Hidan nods absent-mindedly, eyes still fixed on the fire taking in the screams of dying men and women and breathing in the smoke and smell of burnt flesh even as he follows Kakuzu. The fire breathing mask returns to Kakuzu’s side at a hand gesture. The one using wind style starts circling above their heads, then goes of in one particular direction, away from the camp.  
  
“That way.” Kakuzu follows it and together they leave behind the chaos of the camp. There won’t be any survivors with what is going on. The mask spitting lightning stays behind to wreak more havoc and shatter anyone’s hope of escape.  
  
Hidan dives into the trees with Kakuzu, follows him and the mask creatures. Soon enough the silhouette of Kurosame appears in front of them, with two more jonin at his side.  
  
The wind mask creature lets out another sharp breath that cuts off the branches the group tries to land on, pushing them to the ground. Hidan and Kakuzu catch up to them.  
  
Hidan throws his scythe and lets it pull him along. His blade collides with the sword of one of the jonin. The other one takes it as his chance to attack him from behind and Hidan spits blood as the second sword pierces cleanly through his throat. It hurts, it’s comfortable, it tastes like metal and makes breathing hard.  
  
Hidan reaches for his spear, sends a prayer to Jashin, and rams it into the first jonin’s neck. Blood sprays right into his face and the man goes down with wet gurgling noises, dropping his weapon to clutch at his neck. Once he’s dropped to the ground he’s lifeless.  
  
The other jonin yanks his sword out of Hidan’s throat, cutting his neck wide open. Hidan lets out a hoarse shout, feels the wound as he turns around to face the other man. He only vaguely notices the earth shake, sees Kurosame fly through his field of view, closely followed by Kakuzu and the wind mask, but his focus is fully on the jonin who’s raising his weapon again to fight Hidan. “That really fucking hurts, asshole!” Even as his muscles and arteries try to reconnect in his neck it still stings.  
The jonin makes signs with one hand and draws water from the air around them, lets it gather around the blade of his sword.  
  
Hidan charges at him, swings his scythe. When it connects with the man, he dissolves into water and appears again a few feet away to start a counter attack. Hidan takes the sword strike straight to the chest. Catches the blade in his hand. It cuts in until it hits bone and Hidan holds it tightly. Another swing with his scythe and the jonin’s legs collapse under him, separated from the rest of his body. Blood and guts spill from his torso and Hidan drops him. The Akatsuki coat is soaked with water and blood that’s slowly drying.  
  
The earth shakes again and Hidan looks around for Kakuzu. He finds him in a small clearing between some trees still facing off against Kurosame. Kurosame, however, is already stumbling where he’s standing, trying not to fall to his knees and into the splinters of torn apart trees. He’s clutching on of his arms. The wind and fire masks stand next to Kakuzu.  
  
Above the trees Hidan spots the lightning mask fly by and return to his side too. Hidan decides to make his move too.  
  
The next thing he sees is Kakuzu’s hand digging into Kurosame’s chest and shortly after he rips it out again, a still pounding heart in his grip. Kurosame’s face goes pale and then his whole body sacks lifelessly to the ground, bleeding out, just as Hidan breaks through the last bushes and into the clearing. Kakuzu spares him a short glance and turns his attention back to the heart in his hand, seeping out blood over his fingers. Then thick black threads break from the scars over his arms and wrap around the heart. Hidan hears its pounding and then it’s muffled as the threads drag it underneath Kakuzu’s skin.  
  
Hidan watches it all with fascination. Kakuzu’s back is just as covered with scars and stitches as the rest of him and they open as a new mask crystallises out of his body. At another hand sign the other three elemental masks take a dive and merge into Kakuzu. It looks uncomfortable. The three masks arrange themselves around the new one and the clearing falls quiet.  
  
Hidan watches Kakuzu pick up Kurosame’s body and throw it over his shoulder. “That’s freaky,” he eventually says.  
  
Kakuzu raises a brow at him. “You were halfway decapitated and you’re still talking.”  
  
“Right.” Hidan scratches the back of his head. It only serves to smear blood into his hair.  
  
“Come here.” Kakuzu waves him over.  
  
Hidan hesitates but eventually follows the command. “What?”  
  
Kakuzu reaches out for his neck, threads erupting from his scars again. They pierce through Hidan’s skin, make him flinch as they sew his halfway cut off head back to his torso. “Ow ow ow.”  
  
“Shut up. This should heal faster than if you just let it be.” He repeats the procedure on Hidan’s other open wounds, sewing them shut. They stop bleeding all together and sure enough, all the nerves and veins start to reconnect faster than Hidan is used to.  
“Didn’t take you for so benevolent.”  
  
“Whatever.” Kakuzu finishes stitching him up and readjusts his hold on Kurosame. “We’re leaving. Come on.”  
  
“What? Hey, no!” Hidan catches him by the arm. “I need to do my ritual first.”  
  
“That’s out of question,” Kakuzu replies, “The village people have probably already seen the fire.”  
  
“I need to do it!”  
  
“We came here to kill Kurosame, not a whole camp. That was our mission and we could have accomplished it without you charging in and creating a bloodbath.”  
  
Hidan shoulders his scythe, to show it off more than anything else. To signal that he’d be ready to fight if this argument went any further. “It’s against the way of Jashin to go into a fight with the intention of sparing lives. I had to, and now I have to do the ritual so Jashin will receive all their souls.”  
  
Kakuzu pinches the bridge of his nose. “This is nonsense.”  
  
Hidan pushes the scythe under his nose but the gesture is met with only an unimpressed look from Kakuzu before he turns away.  
  
“I’m not getting in a fight with you,” Kakuzu continues as he goes back the way they came from.  
  
Hidan follows him. “Fucking coward. Was last time enough for you?”  
  
“I came here to complete my mission and gather a new heart with an affinity for water because someone destroyed the old one.”  
  
Hidan vaguely remembers the black liquid spilling from Kakuzu’s sleeve the first time they met. So what Hidan managed to kill back then had only been one heart.  
  
“We’re leaving this place tonight,” Kakuzu goes on, “We’ll find the nearest bounty station and sell him off.” He nods at Kurosame hanging from his shoulder. “And then we’ll keep doing just that – bounty hunting – until we’re given a new mission.”  
  
Hidan swings his scythe at him. It tears into the surrounding trees, tearing a slash into the bark. Kakuzu is gone from where he stood and Hidan finds him again up on a tree branch.  
  
The rest of the way back is quiet, Hidan mumbling curses to himself and Kakuzu walking too far ahead to hear it. Before them the trees part and offer a view over the burning camp. There’s the small crater Kakuzu punched into the ground with collapsed tents and dead bodies framing it. The tents that aren’t collapsed are ashes or on their way to become ash. The lightning has torn gouges into the ground. The air is heavy with smoke and the smell of burnt flesh and blood soaking the earth.  
  
Once they break free from the trees, Hidan stands still to take it all in, breathes in deep and lets it settle in his lungs. The smell of fire is an oddly calming one. His gaze shortly falls on Kakuzu who keeps walking but for a split second Hidan thinks that he looks very young and very old at the very time, a strong, scarred body with old, tired eyes that have seen too much to be impressed by a burning camp.  
  
As though he notices Hidan’s eyes on him, Kakuzu turns his head. “You’d better finish your fucking ritual until I find my cloak again. I won’t wait.”  
  
Yet when Hidan opens his eyes again, staring up at a night sky illuminated by fire and destruction and souls on their way to Jashin’s side, Kakuzu is sitting next to the symbol on the ground, arms crossed and annoyed but silent.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm taking a lot of liberties with both their powers since especially Kakuzu with the masks should be way stronger than shown in the anime. The liberties I'm taking with Hidan's immortality basically have nothing to do with canon anymore. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed! I still have a lot of fun writing this and should be able to keep updating regularly!


	4. Chapter Four

“This is fucking blasphemy.”

“It wasn’t even your kill.”

They watch Kurosame’s body disappear into the guts of the morgue. The hall is dimly lit, ventilation keeps it cool and the stench of death is omnipresent. The man running it leaves for a back room and returns with a suitcase of money. Kakuzu counts it meticulously and Hidan rolls his eyes at that. The money seems to the right amount and the morgue’s owner sends them off with wishes of another successful hunt.

“Killing for money. That’s really low.”

“Money is all that matters,” Kakuzu replies.

“Killing is supposed to be something holy.”

Kakuzu is already flipping through the pages of his bingo book again, finding the one with Kurosame’s face on it and marking it with a big X. He flips another few pages and then Hidan is looking at himself, a seventeen year old version of himself that is. “You’re still worth thirty million ryo.”

Hidan shrugs. “So? You’re threatening me or what?”

“You’re wanted dead or alive. I wouldn’t need to kill you.”

“You did that with your previous partners too? Threatened them until they left? Sold them off?”

“I killed my previous partners. That’s the only reason the leader assigned us to be a team.”

Hidan grins. So that’s how it is. “So you wouldn’t be able to get rid of me? How petty. Well, now I have to stay around you just to annoy you.”

“Shut your mouth.” Kakuzu pointedly turns around, everything signalling that the conversation is over now. Hidan hurries up to keep pace with him as they follow the road. There’s no goal they have right now with Kakuzu still flipping pages, now intentionally skipping whenever the one with Hidan’s face on it comes up.

“Yeah no,” Hidan says, “I’m gonna complain as much as I want and you can fucking try to shut me up because I’ll shut up when I’m dead. Good luck killing me, bastard.”

Kakuzu decidedly doesn’t look at him but Hidan thinks he’s clenching his jaw, gritting his teeth under that mask.

“You know what makes me sick? Your fucking greed. We sleep outside most nights and whenever you do feel generous enough to book us rooms they’re the smallest and most disgusting ones of the area. It sucks, it fucking sucks. You’re miserly and antisocial and you’re always looking at that fucking book.”

Hidan slaps the bingo book from Kakuzu’s hands.

Kakuzu punches him in the face. Sends Hidan stumbling back several steps until he’s able to catch his balance again. His jaw aches as he cracks it back into place. It will become a pretty bruise. When he catches Kakuzu’s eyes on him, his breath hitches. There’s pure fury in the man’s eyes, brows knitted together and even without seeing it under mask Hidan knows he’s snarling.

“Fuck,” Hidan gasps. He can’t help the grin spreading on his face, the shiver running down his back, the hard thump of his heart. None of it is because he’s scared. Right now this is just for him, white hot anger just focused on him. “You wanna do that again?” It’s meant to be a taunt but Hidan doesn’t believe that for a second himself.

The answer is a hand shooting forward, only connected to Kakuzu’s body by black threads, and grabs him by the throat to lift him off the ground. Any gasps and coughs are choked and Hidan desperately holds on to Kakuzu’s wrist. He has strong hands, fingers suffocating him masterfully.

“I won’t always be so patient with you,” Kakuzu growls, really growls, his voice even deeper and more grave than usual. Hidan becomes light-headed from just hearing it more than from the choke hold keeping his blood from flowing to his head. “We’ll do our missions my way or I will find a way to get rid of you. Are we clear?”

“Fuck you.”

Kakuzu’s grip on him tightens. It’s exhilarating but Hidan’s grin falls the more he loses consciousness and control over his muscles. He pats the wrist as a sign of surrender. Kakuzu lets go just enough to let him speak. “We’re clear.”

“Are we?”

“Yeah, yeah, you fucker. Let me down!”

To his surprise Kakuzu actually lets him down, lets him down gently at that and setting him down on his feet before he lets go and retracts his arm.

“We’re staying at an inn tonight.”

***

The inn has bigger rooms than Hidan has grown used to. The bed is big enough for him to really stretch out for once with soft pillows that smell clean. Kakuzu has the room right next to his and they’re connected with a door between just the two of them.

The first thing Hidan does is stripping down and soaking himself in a warm bath, getting rid of grime and sweat. Outside the evening sun makes everything orange and Hidan thinks.

This could be everything he’s ever wanted. He just has to make it work.

He dries himself off and gets dressed in only trousers, shirts be damned. He knocks on the connecting door and doesn’t wait for an answer before barging through.

Maybe a part of him expected a reversed scenario of last time but he finds Kakuzu sitting on his bed with the newspaper he grabbed from this village’s marketplace on his knees. The way he’s looking up at Hidan suggests that Hidan had better have a good reason to interrupt his precious alone time like this.

“I’ve been thinking,” Hidan starts.

“Didn’t know you’re capable of that.” Kakuzu turns his attention back to the newspaper.

“Oh, ha ha.” Hidan lets himself fall onto the bed to stare up at the ceiling. “I’ve been thinking” he repeats, “We’re supposed to be a team and-”

“That’s a strange way to begin with an apology.”

“Fuck you.” Hidan consciously reminds him to make the remark less biting than he means to. “I’m trying here, okay? Besides, I have nothing to apologise for. You’re the one who punched me.”

“You killed one of my hearts.”

“You impaled me. Twice.”

“I’ll apologise for the first time but not for the rest.”

“I’ll apologise for killing one of your hearts.” The words feel strange in his mouth. He really isn’t used to apologise for anything. “Man, that sounds weird. How the hell does that even work? You just steal hearts and collect them?”

If Kakuzu notices the awkward change of topics he doesn’t comment on it. “I already told you it’s a Forbidden Technique. It allows me to prolong my life by taking other’s hearts and it also grants me access to a heart’s powers. I prefer to keep a heart for every nature transformation.”

“Ah. And what I killed was the water one?”

Kakuzu nods and flips a page in his newspaper.

Hidan goes through the masks he’s seen in battle. “So your own affinity is for earth?”

Kakuzu nods again.

“Okay, got it. That’s pretty cool. Freaky, but cool.”

“Most people only find it… freaky.”

Hidan shrugs and grins up at him before stretching out more. “I don’t think I have the right to call something like that only freaky.” He taps at the stitches still on his neck. “I’m healed by the way. Can you remove these?”  
Kakuzu reaches out and the thread on Hidan’s neck retracts. It stings and leaves behind red marks. They will be gone within the next few hours. Hidan rubs at the spots anyway. “Thanks. - Anyways, as I said, I was thinking and now if I got it right you have, what? Five hearts and you can be killed four times and only the fifth time will be final? So you’re not immortal.”

“I’ve never claimed to be. People tend to confuse being immortal with simply being hard to kill.” Whatever article he’s reading seems to be more interesting than the conversation they’re having. Hidan suppresses the irritation raising at that thought. He wanted to try to deal with this without violence for once.

“Well, I’m immortal. Really immortal. No death by stab wounds or decapitation or starvation or anything. But it’s only because Lord Jashin granted it to me and I need to do my rituals to keep it that way. We’re supposed to be partners, right? So let’s figure out a way to make it work.”

Kakuzu finally sets down the newspaper on the night table and turns to face Hidan. “What do you propose we do?”

“Tell me about yourself or something?” Hidan tries. He reaches out and is actually surprised when Kakuzu lets him take his hand without any kind of resistance, though his eyes watch him sceptically. Hidan shoves the sleeve back and exposes the tattooed rings around Kakuzu’s forearm. “You’ve been to prison. Tell me about that.”

Kakuzu sighs. “Is this an exchange of information?”

“I don’t know. I guess I can do something in exchange.”

“I’ll tell you and I won’t hear any complaining from you tomorrow while we’re on our way.”

Hidan cringes. “Yeah, okay, fine.” So much for his plans of annoying Kakuzu to the best of his abilities just to spite him for what he said earlier that day.

“Fine.” Kakuzu takes a pause as though he needs to prepare for what he’s about to say and for that short moment Hidan isn’t sure if it was right to ask at all, if it had done more good to just let it be. “It was a long time ago. Takigakure was at war, as were all lands at the time. I was sent out to kill Hashirama.”

“Wow, stop right there. Hashirama?” Hidan sits up, elbows on his knees, and stares Kakuzu straight in the face. “You don’t look that old.”

“I’m ninety.”

“Well shit. That’s one hell of a Forbidden Technique.”

“I didn’t know about it yet back then.”

“You fought Hashirama with only one heart?” For a moment they only stare at each other until Hidan’s laughter breaks out and he lets himself flop back on his back. “And you lived. That’s crazy. That’s amazingly crazy.”

“I think you’re exhausting your vocabulary there.”

“Ha ha.”

“I survived, yes. Barely, but I did. When I returned to Takigakure however my mission was regarded a failure and I was thrown in prison by the elders. When I had the next opportunity I broke out and stole my village’s Forbidden Technique. The first hearts I extended my life with were the ones of the elders.”

Hidan grins.

“If you think about it the world does really evolve around money. Ideals are worthless, they won’t feed you, they won’t keep you alive.”

“Okay, now you lost me.”

“I don’t expect you to understand that.”

The remark keeps Hidan’s grin from faltering completely. “Right, I’ve never feared for my life ever.”

“Care to elaborate?”

“You wanna know about me? Got you interested?”

“Don’t flatter yourself.” Kakuzu crosses his arms.

“Sorry to disappoint you but in exchange I was supposed to not complain for the whole day tomorrow and I’m going with that.”

“Then scram. Go to sleep. Wouldn’t want to hear your break this deal by complaining about being tired first thing.”

To his own surprise Hidan feels fatigue catch up with him. As though his body just needed the reminder to suddenly feel heavy and tired. Maybe it’s just the cosiness of the bed. “Scared I’ll kill you in your sleep?”

“I’m not sharing a bed with you when you have your own.”

Hidan gets up. “Fine, fine. Jashin doesn’t want your soul – or five – anyway.”

***

No matter how much Hidan thinks he’s hiding it Kakuzu notices the tiredness in the way his shoulders are slumped and his feet are dragging over the floor while he leaves for his own room. Kakuzu is left behind with a halfway unread newspaper and the feeling that he needs to know more about the other man. A bigger, more resolute part of him shoves that thought down immediately. He needs to know nothing more than Hidan’s abilities in combat. The only thing he should be looking forward to is sleep and a tomorrow without any complaining from Hidan.

Yet the way Hidan deflected direct questions about himself strikes him as odd. For someone claiming that they should trust each other for the sake of their partnership, it was a strange thing to do, even though he was so genuine about wanting improve it nonetheless.

That sincerity was another odd thing, and Kakuzu couldn’t help but wonder where it came from after their fighting had ended with fists once more.

What peculiar people their leader found this time.

***

Hidan is seven and the world is blood. Everything is swimming in all red. The home he grew up in is painted in it, the streets he used to play in with other kids of the village are flooded. They’re all drowned somewhere underneath the surface but the dark, dark red makes it impossible to see them. All the other houses are painted red too. The hills around the villages are red. The moon is red. There’s a tone in the air that keeps ringing sharply and piercingly. At first it had hurt but by now his ears are used to it, almost drowned out by the noise inside his own head. The red is drenching his sleeves, the front of his shirt and his knees, slowly beginning to become dry and brown and crusty.

He doesn’t know what thoughts he keeps repeating anymore, the words have lost all meaning and when he’s older he won’t remember them anyway.

He thinks he knows a lot despite everything. He knows the people that caused all this. He knows that it’s pointless to seek them out. He knows that they’ve killed everyone and he knows that no one will care.

He knows that they killed him.

He knows that he’s still alive anyway.

***

Hidan startles awake. The moon outside is bright and silver. His skin is cold with sweat and his breathing comes ragged and fast.

It takes several moments to fully return to reality. He’s in the inn Kakuzu paid for and the man himself is resting in the next room, just a few feet away from him.

Hidan lets himself fall back into his pillow and tries to fall back asleep with that knowledge. It’s harder now and the small part of him that was too tired before is now wide awake again. The part that’s insisting that he should have told Kakuzu everything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The beginning is really, really slow but I promise I'm getting somewhere with all this. Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed!


	5. Chapter Five

Their next target is in Otogakure. Without a new mission assigned by the leader Kakuzu decided for them to keep bounty hunting, so now they’re chasing a thirty million man by the name of Jihomaru. According to what Kakuzu explained he was nothing but a criminal who happened to have a high number of bodies on his name. Not much different from Hidan.  
  
“But without the immortality factor,” Hidan says.  
  
“Sh!”  
  
They’re ducked into the bushes of the forest surrounding a small clearing. There’s a small hut in the middle of it with Jihomaru hiding out inside. He hasn’t come out in two days at all.  
  
“Let’s just go in. Come on.”  
  
“Shut up, Hidan.”  
  
Hidan rolls his eyes. He’s promised himself to try and follow the way Kakuzu has planned this mission to go. He doesn’t shut up however. “Let’s just burn it down. ‘S not like that fucker could escape from that.”  
  
“I need something confirmed first.”  
  
Hidan sighs heavily. “Okay, fine.”  
  
They keep waiting and nothing happens. After a while Hidan gives up and doesn’t bother watching the hut anymore. He’s bored. There’s nothing interesting in the area. The villages are small as anywhere else, not even the forest itself isn’t anything special. Just trees with leaves slowly turning red and orange as autumn comes around. Up in the north it’s not long until winter approaches too.  
  
“You’re owing me dinner for this.”  
  
“We still have rations left,” Kakuzu answers.  
  
Hidan cringes at the thought of dried meat and berries from the woods. It’s not like two immortals, particularly Hidan, need to eat to stay alive but it’s grounding to do it anyway. “I want actual food.”  
  
“Shut up!”  
  
Hidan opens his mouth to respond to that but bites it back when Kakuzu slaps his wrist and nods in the direction of the hut. Its door opens and the person who comes out is not the person in the bingo book. Instead it’s a woman with long black hair stacked up into a complicated bun and dressed like a shrine maiden. The hut is anything but a shrine. She leaves on the path through the woods and heads for the village down the slope of the hill.  
  
Hidan watches her go. “Got your confirmation?”  
  
Kakuzu doesn’t answer but leaves their hideout and goes for the hut. Hidan follows him. The door is locked and Kakuzu kicks it open. The hut is as small on the inside as it looks from the outside. It’s only divided into two rooms, one bigger than the other which is only meant for sleeping in. They’re mostly empty with only packaging of food lying in one corner and wood for a fireplace in another.  
  
“Fucking smells.” The stench is eye-wateringly stingy and hurts in his throat. It’s not the leftover food from the packagings but something else. Hidan knows it too well. “Something fucking died here.”  
  
Kakuzu goes to check the back room and stops dead in the door frame. “Got my confirmation.”  
  
Hidan takes a look over his shoulder. The back room stinks even more than the rest of the hut and sure enough there’s a corpse. It’s a man with thin hair and pale waxen skin. He’s wearing the colours Hidan has noticed most villagers in the area wear. He recognises the face too. “That’s him.”  
  
Kakuzu only hums.  
  
“That’s good then, right? Less trouble for us if that woman already killed him. We can still take the body and get you your damn money.”  
  
“It’s not him,” Kakuzu says.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Whoever this is has been dead for at least five days already.”  
  
“Then who’s that person?” By now Hidan can taste the corpse’s smell on his tongue, it makes him want to vomit. It makes him feel pathetic. After all it’s not the first time he’s seeing and smelling a corpse. The smell of death is a familiar one. “Hey, can we leave?”  
  
Kakuzu shrugs and Hidan follows him outside. “When we left the village I heard about people going missing every now and then.”  
  
“I was with you all the time. Why didn’t I hear about it?”  
  
“Because you never pay attention,” Kakuzu answers without missing a beat. “Anyways, one of the missing persons was a shrine maiden. It happened quiet recently, just before we arrived.”  
  
“The one we just saw?”  
  
Kakuzu nods.  
  
“So she and that Jihomaru guy are working together?”  
  
“I doubt that.”  
  
They make their way back down the hill, too, keeping away from the road and sticking to beaten paths in the bushes. Hidan hates it when they have to do that, all for the sake of staying inconspicuous.  
  
“He’s worth as much money as you,” Kakuzu says, “You are hard to kill-”  
  
“ _Impossible_ to kill.”  
  
“- and that’s why your bounty is as high as it is. They wouldn’t give such a high bounty to just any serial murderer, so I could already be certain that something isn’t quite right with this one either. Are you following?”  
  
“You’re saying he has some special ability. What do you think it is?”  
  
“Skin changing.”  
  
A twig hits Hidan in the face and leaves a cut. “So that makes things complicated. Ugh, can you just tell me who to kill?”  
  
“Our target is still the same. Jihomaru switched his appearance with the shrine maiden.”  
  
“So we’re gonna kill her – him.”  
  
“I’m beginning to think you’re not all stupid.”

The shrine of the village lies on a hill opposite to the one they’ve just been on, the village lying in the valley between them. Their way is made longer by drawing closer through the woods and by the time they arrive night has fallen. The shrine is a big complex of buildings with solemnity dripping from their very walls. A relief on the entrance gate depicts the forest deities the shrine is dedicated to, some kind of bird and squirrels.  
  
“This is weird,” Hidan says, “Temples are weird.”  
  
Kakuzu gives him a short glance. “Does your god not have temples?”  
  
“Nah.” Hidan shakes his head. “Temples are something for protectors. Jashin is a death god. The only holy ground for him is battlefields.” Hidan takes his pendant with Jashin’s symbol in hand and sends a short prayer to him, if only to mock the shrine’s ground he’s standing on now. They’re about to make a kill anyway.  
  
The shrine is inhabited by young men and women, each busy with their own tasks of gardening, polishing the shrine’s animal figures or cleaning the floors. Some villagers kneels at the main shrine with their hands clutched together, making their last prayers for the night. One by one lights flick on in the windows.  
  
“The shrine is guarded,” Kakuzu says, “They may not look like it but even the shrine maidens were trained to detect intruders.”  
  
“What? So they’re protecting something?” Hidan guesses.  
  
“A scroll containing a Forbidden Technique.”  
  
The pieces fall into place in Hidan’s head. “And Jihomaru wants it for himself. Wait, to do what?”  
  
Kakuzu shrugs and by now they’re close enough to the shrine to potentially be seen. He doesn’t take his eyes off the buildings and when Hidan watches closer he finds the silhouettes of the shrine maidens in the windows and also a few perched on the rooftops to be on lookout.  
  
“You still know the face of whoever Jihomaru disguised himself as?”  
  
“Vaguely,” Hidan says. With the face paint and the uniform dresses all the women look the same. “I thought you’d know.”  
  
Kakuzu looks him up and down. “It’s time you make yourself useful.”

Kakuzu’s idea of Hidan being useful turns out to be using Hidan as bait. Before he knows it he’s shoved out of the protective shadows of the trees and finds himself standing out in the open, the light of the windows drawing his shadows on the ground.  
When he turns around Kakuzu is already gone. Too fast for Hidan to track down.  
  
“This fucking bastard!” he hisses.  
  
The next seconds are pain and needle pins piercing his torso from all sides. Projectiles fired from blowpipes. Some of the wounds burn more than others, needles stabbing his organs. His heart, his lungs, his windpipe. Under the blood that fills his mouth he tastes something sour. Poison.  
  
He spits it out and goes to work on the needles in his chest, rips them out one by one just as a pack of a dozen shrine maidens lands in front of him. Another mouthful of blood chokes him while his organs repair themselves.  
  
The shrine maidens’ faces are unmoved, hardened by what obviously have been years of intense training to cope with extreme situations. It’s their eyes though, the expression in them, that tells Hidan everything. That despite everything they weren’t prepared for an opponent such as him.  
  
He drops the last needle and grins.  
  
“Come on.” He’s almost grateful that Kakuzu lets him have his way here.  
  
The shrine maidens scatter around him, circle him and their needles fly again. He’s prepared this time and charges at the woman closest to him. They exchange blows. In the dim light he only barely notices the way her skin darkens and she blocks his attacks with her arms, deflects his scythe with her blowpipe.  
  
Some of the other women attack him from the sides and Hidan dodges them. It goes on like this, with him dodging attacks to escape the immobility they’d bring, them dodging and deflecting and keeping a steady stream of needles going.  
  
When he has the chance he tries to think about what Kakuzu’s plan for this is but he’s interrupted by poison making his skin crawl and his body being in a constant state of repair so that the pain stops being something good. He only needs the smallest trickle of blood of one of these women.  
  
With gritted teeth he turns and breaks out of their circle. The shrine maiden there is taken by surprise and Hidan realises that this one in particular has been staying out of his range since the beginning. He swings his scythe at her. She jumps back.  
The blade rips her sleeve and finally there’s the smallest spray of blood.  
  
“Perfect.” He licks the blood from the blade. It tastes different from his own, foul and bitter but he’ll take it. He’ll be rewarded with something sweeter once he has drawn Jashin’s symbol. The shrine maidens are more than happy to make him bleed. Three of them finally switch to knives and attack in a whirlwind of swift blades. One of them cuts open the side of his neck, spraying herself with his blood. It pools by his feet. _You’re so fucking dead._  
  
The symbol is drawn quickly. Hidan watches his skin turn black, his knuckles wearing the white pattern.  
  
The vague expression in the women’s eyes turns into something wide-eyed, horrified. They stop their attacks and return into an arrow-shaped formation, watching him carefully. Hidan keeps his eyes on the one with the ripped sleeve.  
  
“Not careful enough, huh?”  
  
A boom shakes the earth and bright lights spark from the sky. Lightning hits the roof a few buildings away from where Hidan is. The crash of rubble collapsing into each other distracts the women for long enough that they don’t notice the shadow of a black creature hiss through the air above their heads. Only when it lands heavily behind them do they turn around. Hidan’s grin becomes painful. The fire mask creature stares back at him.  
  
“I thought you fucked off,” he says.  
  
The mask opens its mouth wide and a glow builds up in its throat.  
  
“Hey, wa-”  
  
The fire is brighter than anything Hidan knows. It’s a flaming, growling ball of light coming straight at him, burning down everything in its wake. The women scream, first in terror, then in pain. Hidan sees some of them dodge early enough, leaving their comrades behind to burn alive. And then the flames hit him just the same.  
  
It burns. It hurts. Like every pore of his body is being pierced by hundreds of needles at once. He breathes the fire, it forces itself into his nose, his mouth and down his throat, spreads inside his body and burns him from the inside out. It’s unbearable.  
The shrine maiden dies through him and through the fire at the same time. Hidan feels her death wash over him, the pleasant warmth of it a strange and stark contrast to the fire surrounding them both. Despite everything a shiver runs down his spine. He almost wants to cry from how good it feels. _That’s it, that’s it, that’s it._  
  
The fire lets up. The mask closes its mouth and innocently tilts its head at Hidan. Between them lie burnt, smoking corpses and scorched earth. “Fuck,” Hidan gasps once he comes to. His skin returns to normal and he takes a deep breath. This could be it.  
  
This could finally be it.  
  
“Hey, bring me to Kakuzu,” he tells the mask.  
  
It keeps staring at him. Unmoving.  
  
Lightning strikes the building next to the one that’s already collapsed. Hidan starts walking.  
  
The fire masks makes a leap and blocks his way.  
  
“Hey!”  
  
Even without being able to move any non-existent muscles the mask manages to copy Kakuzu’s expression quite well.  
  
“Fine, then.” Hidan crosses his arms and leans back against a tree. His cloak is gone, he notices then, burnt to bits, along with parts of his trousers.  
  
A body is thrown over a roof, another one crashes through the wall of the nearest building, and they both stay down on the ground, lifeless, littered with bruises and open wounds.  
  
Kakuzu appears when the dust settles. The fire mask finally takes its empty eyes from Hidan and returns into Kakuzu’s body. The lightning mask comes flying down as well and takes its place on Kakuzu’s back by the others. The sight of it makes Hidan cringe.  
  
He pushes off the tree and walks up to him. “What was that all about?”  
  
“I needed a bait. I’m sure you came to that conclusion yourself, too.” Kakuzu is carrying his cloak neatly folded over his arm. “While you kept the shrine maidens busy I was taking care of the shrine’s owners.”  
  
Hidan imagines dead bodies torn apart by lightning and buried under rubble.  
  
“I didn’t think you’d have trouble with a pack of women, however.”  
  
Hidan flinches at the remark. “Hey! You try moving while being fired at with poison needles. Oh wait, you’d have died several times over immediately.”  
  
Kakuzu scoffs half-heartedly and shrugs his cloak on. “We got all of them. Did you find our target?”  
  
Hidan shakes his head. “I was too distracted by being fucking torched.”  
  
Kakuzu turns away from him and scouts out the area of the fight. The dust from the collapsed buildings has yet to settle. Here and there patches of grass are still on fire. He walks between the burnt corpses and turns some of them on their backs. Hidan trails behind him, looking for the one maiden he has actually killed himself while trying to drown out the part of him that tells him how pathetic only one kill is when dozens have died just now.  
  
“Hm.” Kakuzu turns a last body around.  
  
The uniform clothing is burnt off almost entirely but the person wearing it isn’t a woman. Scorched red and black and bloody the face contorted into pain is still the one from the wanted poster. Jihomaru’s hard jaw being the most noticeable part in identifying him.  
  
“That was my kill,” Hidan says. No wonder this supposed shrine maiden hadn’t used the same earth style technique of hardening her – his – body as the others. “I get to do my ritual.”  
  
Kakuzu throws him a disgruntled glance and for a while they stare at each other, neither willing to give in this time. In the end, it’s still Kakuzu that does. “Hurry. The village has probably noticed the lightning.”  
  
It is only one soul, only one battlefield. Hidan says his prayers, asks Jashin for forgiveness and promises to do better in the future.  
  
When it’s over he pulls the spear from his torso and lets Kakuzu stitch the wound. He still doesn’t like how Kakuzu picks up Jihomaru’s body but he accepts that this is the contract they’ve silently entered. Hidan gets to do his ritual and Kakuzu gets to make money from their kills. Neither of them have to actually like it.  
  
They leave the mountain to the south where the village is out of sight.

“What was the Forbidden Technique?” Hidan asks once they’re far away from the village. He’s watching Kakuzu’s back, the corpse slung over his shoulder staring at the ground with empty unclosed eyes. Only hours ago it was the face of a whole different person. “Hey, Kakuzu, what do you think was the story behind all this?”  
  
“It doesn’t matter,” Kakuzu answers.  
  
Just as he says it, Hidan finds that he agrees. Finds that he doesn’t care for Jihomaru and whatever motives drove him. While the skin walking technique has been fascinating, it would end here and after they’ve collected the bounty neither of them would mention him ever again.  
  
“You fucking used me as fodder,” he says to change topics, “You could have just told me your plans instead of just torching me like that.”  
  
Kakuzu glances at him over his shoulder. “You would have been alright if I had just told you?”  
  
“Yeah.” Hidan crosses his arms behind his head as they keep walking. “’S not like I’ll die from it but it would be nice if I had time to prepare for it. You know, teamwork and all that.”  
  
“I’ll tell you next time.”  
  
“Good.” Hidan grins to himself and lets it fade into a smile when he catches up to walk beside Kakuzu. “Now that we’ve got that settled, you’re still owing me dinner. And a new cloak.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're slowly getting somewhere with this whole thing!


	6. Chapter Six

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Backstory? Backstory.

The inn is a nice one again. It has big rooms with big windows but Hidan only gets to see one of them from the inside. At first he’d been hesitant to share a room with Kakuzu at all but seeing how far apart their beds are he doesn’t mind it as much anymore. With the right arrangement they could easily fit in all of the Akatsuki in this room. Outside the window lies the green landscape of Takigakure, the location on top of a hill granting a view over countless little valleys carved into the land by crystal blue rivers.

Hidan claims the bed with the view by throwing his bag on it and then himself. The sheets and pillow smell freshly washed and warm from the sunlight falling in. From Jihomaru’s bounty Kakuzu begrudgingly treated Hidan for rips just as they entered this new village and now Hidan feels ready to fall asleep on the spot.

What keeps him awake is the rustling of Kakuzu’s newspaper. It makes him too aware of the other’s presence. He turns to his side and watches him turn pages for a while. The silence between them is comfortable and uncomfortable at the same time.

Kakuzu has taken off his cloak, leaned back against the headboard of his bed and legs stretched out. It’s the most relaxed Hidan has ever seen him and he takes it all in. He’s noticed most of it before, the defined, thick muscles of Kakuzu’s arms and shoulders. The crease between his eyebrows that only ceases a little while he’s reading. The stillness that took over him and that he only breaks to turn a page in his newspaper.

“You’re staring. What do you want?” Kakuzu asks without so much as looking at Hidan.

“Nothing,” Hidan says too fast and lets himself drop on his back to stare at the ceiling instead. “It’s just… you’re from here, right? Takigakure.”

“What about it?”

Hidan folds his arms behind his head to at least pretend nonchalance. Like he’s not a little curious about Kakuzu. “This was your home, wasn’t it? Is anything different from… from back then?” It’s not really what he meant to ask.

“Everything is different from back then,” Kakuzu answers and his tone suggests that that is the best answer Hidan will get.

“I guess.” He sighs. “But life couldn’t have been too different, right? I mean, I don’t know. Did you have a family?” It’s the next best thing to ask even though he won’t get an answer on that either.

“I had a wife.”

Hidan chokes on his own breath. “Oh.”

“I don’t know whether she already died or not, and I don’t intend to find out. I left her and my duty to Takigakure behind me. It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t matter.”

“Did I catch you on a good day or why are you so talkative today?” Hidan teases. He hopes Kakuzu doesn’t hear the nervousness in it.

“It’s no secret,” Kakuzu says, “Go to sleep, Hidan.”

“No, this is interesting.” Hidan wonders what the woman that married someone like Kakuzu must have been like. What Kakuzu must have been like all these decades back. “I can’t imagine you settle down with anyone.”

“It was decades ago. Before the wars. As I said, everything was different.” Kakuzu folds his newspaper and puts it aside.

Hidan’s heart is racing and he doesn’t understand why. His face starts to feel warm when Kakuzu looks at him. He hopes his grin isn’t cracking. “I don’t think I could do that. Settle down, I mean. Sex is great but I think I’m just not made for long-term kind of stuff. - Hey, was she nice?”

“She was… ordinary,” Kakuzu answers, intent on ignoring Hidan’s previous comments, “Her family consisted of merchants, she ran a shop of her own. I didn’t love her but she was a fine woman. Now she doesn’t matter anymore.”

“If you say so.”

Kakuzu reaches for the switch of the lamp on his night stand. Hidan’s is already switched off and with a new moon in the sky the stars are the only thing shining down on them in this room.

“Hey, wait.”

Kakuzu holds still in the middle of his movement.

Hidan rolls on his side once more and puts his chin on one hand. “Take off the mask. You never take it off around me but you can’t tell me you’re intending to even sleep with it on.”

“I intend to sleep with it on.”

“Don’t make me come over there,” Hidan threatens teasingly and then more seriously, “Come on, I’m curious. It can’t be that bad.”

Kakuzu closes his eyes as though to collect himself, to gather all the strength it takes not to slap Hidan from across the room. Without another word he reaches for his mask and pulls it away together with the hood covering most of his head. Dark hair falls down over his shoulders and the masks on his back. The sight of it is astonishing enough on its own but then Hidan sees Kakuzu’s face for the first time. Scars lead from the corners of his mouth to his ears. Hidan finds that he doesn’t mind it at all. It’s oddly fitting, looks actually good on him. Now he also has the confirmation that Kakuzu really is scowling most of the time under his mask.

He waits until he makes a comment, just to mess with Kakuzu a little, to cover up that his heart might have skipped a beat. “I’ve fucked uglier guys.”

Kakuzu’s scowl deepens and he turns off the lights. “Go to sleep, Hidan.”

***

Falling asleep with another person in the room is something Kakuzu isn’t quite used to anymore. He’s anticipating an attack at every little noise even though rationality tells him that it’s just Hidan rolling around in his bed to get more comfortable. Eventually Hidan’s breathing evens out and he’s lying still, fast asleep.

It leaves Kakuzu awake and staring up at the ceiling. From his angle he only sees the sky when he looks out the window. He knows the landscape out there, marked by the flow of rivers, valleys torn into earth by the force of water masses. Just a few miles away is the waterfall that hides the entrance to Takigakure. He’s as close to his old life as he rarely is, preferring to avoid missions that send him here. The leader accepts that decision most of the time but during the last years Kakuzu hasn’t been here anymore.

A part of him curses Hidan for having made him think of the past.

Having made him not tell the whole truth.

He remembers Kimiko well. An ordinary woman with barely anything that would have made her particularly noticable. A merchant’s daughter with her own shop and a peaceful life. In retrospect Kakuzu knows that it was that normalcy that had drawn him to her, that had made it possible for the two of them to settle down together. They had had a small but cozy house, a good place to return to after weeks that Kakuzu often spent on running missions for the village. Kimiko would greet him with open arms and homecooked meals, would show him the flowers she planted in their garden, would talk about neighbours he barely knew. She had been a kind woman, so different from him. Despite their marriage she was living a life that he couldn’t understand and still didn’t. Didn’t want to.

Still, in the quietness of the inn’s room, he wonders if she is still alive. She must be old by now. He wonders if she had married anew, if she had brought children into the world.

A rustle of sheets interrupts his thoughts and he watches Hidan kick his blanket off. Another glance out the window shows the moon. Evening has long passed and it’s the middle of the night. Kakuzu feels wide awake.

Hidan starts shivering after a while and, unable to find his blanket in his sleep, wraps his arms around himself. He turns multiple times before heavy breathing sets in and his fingers fly to the pillow and cling to it tightly. He’s mumbling in his sleep, something incoherent and wordless. His brows knit together and in the moonlight sweat starts gleaming on his skin.

Kakuzu watches him thrash around, shaken by whatever nightmare he is having, but doesn’t interfere.

Eventually, Hidan startles awake and sits up in his bed. His eyes tear open and they’re wide, staring at his feet while he tries to get his breathing back under control. He wipes spit from his mouth and reaches for the discarded blanket. That’s when he notices Kakuzu watching and freezes. “Hey.” He grins but it’s awkward and nothing like the self-assured flash of teeth Kakuzu knows. “Did I wake you up? Sorry.”

“I was still up.”

“Oh.” Hidan slowly pulls his blanket over his legs. “Okay. I’ll just- I’ll just go back to sleep.”

“Yeah.”

Hidan turns to face the wall and Kakuzu does the same on his side of the room. He doesn’t need to see Hidan to know that they’re both not getting any more sleep this night.

***

“Kakuzu, I’m bored.”

“What do you expect me to do about that?”

They’re still wandering through Takigakure, a river running parallel to the road they’re taking. Autumn makes the air crisp and cool.

“Entertain me.” Hidan crosses his arms behind his head and stares at the sky. It’s peaceful in Takigakure. Yugakure’s autumns are darker and colder. “Hey, what about Hashirama? What was he like?” He knows stories about the god of shinobi but they’re just that: stories. It’s hard to believe that a man like that ever really existed but here’s one who has lived at the same time, someone who even fought him.

“I didn’t take you for someone interested in history.”

“I’m not,” Hidan says defensively, “I’m interested in what you have to say.”

Kakuzu sighs and Hidan grins triumphantly. He will get his answers, one by one. “Hashirama Senju was an honourable, peace-loving fool, and if you want to hear hero stories about him, you should ask someone else.”

Hidan shakes his head. “Almost thought so. Go on.”

“He was strong. There’s a reason they liken him to a god. He’s fought many battles and he’s won all of them. That’s what he was known for anyways. He just brought peace to his beloved Konoha when unrest was boiling up again.”

“Why though?”

Kakuzu shrugs. “People aren’t meant to be peaceful. Whatever the reason there will always be unrest and eventual war. I’ve seen three shinobi wars, I expect to see many more.” He clicks his tongue. “Anyways, sending me out to assassinate him didn’t end well for me. Compared to him, I was...”

“An insect,” Hidan offers.

“An insect,” Kakuzu accepts, “There weren’t many people who could take him on to begin with and those were people far out of my league. But back then I thought that I could manage to kill him if I was clever enough.”

Hidan tries to imagine it. Kakuzu without the Jiongu trying to take on the god of shinobi. It doesn’t work out in his head, but he can easily see that someone would lose against Hashirama.

“Hashirama didn’t kill me but he did leave me to die. It was probably his way of showing mercy. As I said he was a peace-loving fool.”

Hidan catches up to Kakuzu to walk next to him and see his face better, to watch all the small motions taking place around his eyes. Kakuzu doesn’t pay him any mind, keeps looking ahead while he continues his tale.

“I returned to my village beaten and ashamed. You know the rest.”

Hidan nods. “So you’re saying it would have been better if Hashirama had just killed you?”

There’s a beat of silence between them. Contemplative, uncomfortable, until Kakuzu speaks again. “Maybe.”

Hidan scoffs.

“What?”

“I don’t think so,” Hidan says and he’s as surprised as Kakuzu seems to be at the words when he finally looks at Hidan. Hidan finds that he likes that, Kakuzu looking at him. They’ve been travelling together for months now, completing missions and hunting bounties, collecting money and eating meals together. It’s a much more comfortable life than the one Hidan had been leading before. He enjoys himself. Even enjoys Kakuzu’s company even if he’s quick to anger at times. Even though their views on religion and the importance of money differ as much as they do.

“I don’t think so,” he repeats earnestly, “I think it’s good that you’re alive. I wouldn’t want to be the only immortal in the world.” _I wouldn’t want to be alone_ , he doesn’t say. He keeps that to himself.

Kakuzu stares at him for the duration of a second.

Hidan stares back. The grin he’s sporting is awkward and he hopes Kakuzu doesn’t notice. “I think we’re already getting along better, don’t you think.”

Kakuzu rolls his eyes. “You’re insufferable, annoying and aggravating.”

“Yeah, but you’re not getting rid of me so easily.” He’s placing an elbow on Kakuzu’s shoulder as they keep walking. The angle is weird with Kakuzu being just a little taller than him but he doesn’t let that stop him. Kakuzu doesn’t shrug him off either. “Admit it,” he teases, “You’d miss me if I was gone.”

“Don’t flatter yourself.” Kakuzu still waits until Hidan removes his arm by himself. They continue to walk in silence after that. It’s less awkward, more comfortable now that they’ve come to some quiet understanding. Even though Hidan only meant it to be teasing he knows himself that there has been maybe too much truth in his words. After the life he’s lived until they met, he doesn’t want to be alone again.

Kakuzu is strong, careful and reliable, someone who won’t die easily. Someone Hidan can stay with for as long as he is wanted.


	7. Chapter Seven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't remember who it was but I saw someone's headcannon of Deidara being non-binary and I vibe with that, so yeah, non-binary Deidara in this fic.

Hidan notices the relief in Kakuzu when they leave Takigakure for Kusagakure. The Land of Grass isn’t as different at first. The land becames flatter. Forests and wide meadows border on the road they’re taking. Kusagakure itself looks more modern than anything Hidan has seen in the other lands. The buildings are high and made from concrete, grey and overshadowing the grassland around it. The streets are full of people and yet peaceful. While Hidan is sure that pickpocketers exist here just as everywhere else, he doesn’t notice them.

Most people on the main streets are foreigners with Kusagakure being located between two other big countries. It’s a passage for travellers more than anything else, and Hidan and Kakuzu are just that as well.

They meet Sasori and Deidara in a small tea house in a quieter part of the city, between small alleyways. The kind of establishment that’s a secret tip of the locals. They notice the others’ red and black cloaks at a table and without any greetings sit down with them.

“You know not taking your hat off is bad manners,” Hidan says to Deidara.

They still wear their strawhat, pulled deep into their face but they lift it just enough to shoot Hidan a deadly glare. “People here might know me.”

“Not exactly making yourself less suspicious.”

“When did you start caring for subtlety, hm?” Deidara bites.

Sasori is staying inside the Hiruko puppet. Kakuzu has explained to Hidan that he prefers it. What Sasori looks like inside it he didn’t care to elaborate on. The sight is strange knowing it’s just a puppet, though. Its movements are too fluent for that and it makes no wooden sounds. The voice that comes out of it is deep and cracking from age, the closest thing to a creak. “Stop the childishness! Both of you.”

“He started,” Deidara defends themself.

“I don’t care,” Sasori hisses back, “Let’s just get this done with.”

Deidara flips their hair and sighs, defeated. They take their hat off, letting it hang from their neck with blond hair flooding their shoulders.

A waitress comes over to their table to take Hidan and Kakuzu’s orders. She’s all smiley and giddy.

“What are we gonna do?” Hidan asks. He only knows that they’re supposed to go to Iwagakure.

“The Four-Tails is soon going to be passed on to a new vessel,” Sasori says, “It will happen in Iwagakure under the scrutiny of the Tsuchikage.”

“Highest security,” Deidara throws in.

“As you know, the leader wants to find the tailed beasts, and he wants them soon.”

Hidan lets himself slump back in his seat. “Why us, though? Hey, blondie, you’re from Iwa. Why aren’t you going?”

Deidara grits their teeth at the nickname but the return of the waitress keeps them from verbally lashing out. Instead they take a few angry sips from their drink and settle back. “They know my face there. ‘S not like I can just walk freely through the city when I’m a known terrorist, hm.”

“Right.”

“So I’m supposed to tell you everything of relevance about Iwa,” Deidara goes on, “About the guards, the routines, all that.”

Hidan balances his chair on the hind legs and sways back and forth while Deidara talks about Iwa’s defences, strength and weaknesses. The more they talk the more Hidan believes that this will be another mission in which he’ll serve as a bait for whatever plan Kakuzu comes up with. When he looks at his partner, Kakuzu looks at the tea he holds between his hands, clearly listening attentively but at the same time sunken into deep thoughts.

Deidara finishes their sermon.

Kakuzu says “Hm”.

“You’re quiet today,” Sasori notes.

“He’s thinking.” Hidan leans over the table to whispers conspirational, “He’s memorised the whole bingo book and he’s trying to find out what bounties are nearby.” He leans back and pats Kakuzu on the shoulder. “Right, old man?”

“Hm,” Kakuzu says again.

The tea is still too hot to drink but Hidan doesn’t bother and downs it in one go. It burns down his throat and makes his stomach feel heavy before his body works against it and heals. “What about you two?”

“The leader sent us to Sunagakure,” Sasori answers. Hidan believes to hear a slight bitterness in his fake voice. “The One-Tail is soon to return to the Hidden Village.”

“Ah, and these other two are hunting yet another Tailed Beast, or what?”

Deidara clicks their tongue. “The leader let them go on a mission to Konoha because Uchiha asked him to. It’s not fair.”

“Shut up, Deidara.” Sasori says it with the same half-heartedness that Kakuzu adopted when making the same demand to Hidan. Fond exasperation.

Kakuzu drops some coins on the table, the exact amount to pay for Hidan and his own drink, and gets up. “If that is all, we’ll be leaving. Come, Hidan.”

Hidan throws the other team a weak smile that is polite in his book and follows Kakuzu out of the tea house and back onto the busy streets of the city’s centre. He catches up to walk next to him. “You’re no social butterfly, are you?”

“We exchanged information, that was the purpose of the meeting,” Kakuzu replies matter-of-factly.

“I guess,” Hidan says. He would have liked to stay just a little longer to have more oppurtunities to rile Deidara up a bit more. Fighting with them every once in a while was fun.

Late afternoon comes around. Some groups of musicians start playing music in different corners of the market area and colourful lanterns are lit. They come across a corner in which multiple street shops offer a sweet-smelling pastry that Hidan has never seen before. If he didn’t know better, he would think that Kusagakure held some kind of festival.

He taps Kakuzu on the shoulder. “Hey, give me some money.”

Kakuzu follows Hidan’s eyes to the pastry shops. “We’re not wasting money on sweets.”

“Oh, come on. I’ve never had these before.”

Now Kakuzu eyes his face, disgruntled as always but also questioning. “Taiyaki are available everywhere else too.”

Hidan pouts. “Fucking miser. I’ll have Jashin curse you.”

Kakuzu answers with a dismissive wave of his hand. “We’re staying here for the night.”

Hidan follows him to an inn at the edge of the city, away from the bustling of the small festival the city is holding. The inn looks cheap from the outside and even cheaper on the inside. The walls are completely barren, the carpets trampled flat and washed out. They take a room together with the beds on opposites. Kakuzu has found it to be the cheapest way and he doesn’t seem to mind Hidan’s presence too much. Hidan doesn’t mind his either.

“You’re quiet,” Kakuzu says.

Hidan glances at him. “Hm, yeah. No reason. I’m taking this bed.” He throws his bag on the bed closest to the room’s window and then flops down on it face first. “I’m beat.”

Kakuzu lets his bag fall on the other bed in silent agreement but turns again to leave. “I’m going to get a newspaper.”

“Fine,” Hidan says muffled against the mattress but it drowns in the closing of the door. It’s quiet. Even more so than before. There’s no people outside to make noise, the inn has almost no other guests and Hidan is alone in their room. The silence is contemplative and he doesn’t like it. It leaves him alone with his thoughts and the solitude brings out ugly ones he doesn’t want to think.

He decides to take a bath and does just that. It’s Kakuzu’s money that got him here, he reminds himself. Kakuzu doesn’t throw it away, wouldn’t use it just to abandon Hidan here, wouldn’t leave the bag with his stuff in the room either. Getting a newspaper isn’t unusual either. All his reasoning doesn’t help against the knot in his throat and the heavy rocks in his stomach. He’s gotten so used to Kakuzu being around him. Outside it is slowly getting dark, night coming earlier every day now. Winter has almost arrived in this part of the land. He towels off, pulls on clean trousers and flops down on Kakuzu’s bed.

The sheets smell clean. Hidan is disappointed but not surprised. From the bed he fishes for Kakuzu’s bag and rummages through it until he finds the bingo book. He flips through the pages, goes over the crossed out pages. Bounties Kakuzu has hunted before teaming up with Hidan. Other faces Hidan knows; he’s killed some of them himself. He finds some wanted posters with Iwa shinobi and continues to flip between them. Earth style users as is common in Iwa. None of them look like people Kakuzu and him wouldn’t be able to handle.

Hidan flinches when the room’s door opens and Kakuzu returns.

“You took your damn time,” Hidan says without looking at him.

A paper bag hits his face and falls in his lap. The smell of sugar comes shortly after.

Kakuzu shrugs his cloak off and hangs it on the rack next to the door. “Get off my bed. I don’t want you to get crumbs on it.”

Hidan stares at him with wide eyes before getting up. The pastry inside the bag is still warm between his hands. He settles down at the table at the foot of his own bed and takes it all in. For the first time in a long time he’s spent travelling with Kakuzu he finds himself speechless. He takes a bite. The pastry is soft and just as sweet as it smells. Halfway he finds that it’s filled with sweet bean paste too.

“This is so fucking good.”

Kakuzu has taken his usual position of reading his newspaper. Recently, he’s taken to not wearing the mask and hood when they’re alone. “You really never had one before?”

Hidan wolfs down the rest of the pastry and immediately regrets not savouring it enough. “Never. They weren’t really a thing in Yugakure to begin with, I think. Damn shame.”

Kakuzu sets down his newspaper. “I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

Hidan stands to throw the paper bag into the trash and falls backwards into his own bed. “Ask away.”

“You can’t control chakra, right?”

Hidan looks at him. “That’s unexpected. Yeah. Why?”

“Then your ritual isn’t a jutsu.”

“It isn’t,” Hidan agrees and takes his pendant of Jashin’s symbol in his hand, “It’s all the power of Jashin. He’s granted me my powers and I’m blessed for as long as I keep up the rituals. Are you sure you don’t want to convert?”

Kakuzu doesn’t answer that. “Go to sleep, Hidan. We’re leaving early tomorrow.”

Somehow it’s become easier to fall asleep with Kakuzu present. The flipping of pages is something soothing and familiar. Hidan finds himself drift off quicker than usual.

***

The village had a name once but Hidan forgot it. He decides to call it the village of blood, a village that has born nothing, has kept alive nothing. Everyone here is dead now. Only he is alive. The logical conclusion is that he doesn’t belong here.

He wasn’t born here, he died here, and he’s leaving it alive.

For days Hidan walks through no man’s land. Most of it is barren, just rocks on rocks, barely warmed by the winter sun, half buried under snow. The world is cold and white but the red, the smell of metal, the screams of agony are everywhere Hidan looks. It’s in the bark of trees, the rustle of the wind and the bitter taste of plants he doesn’t know. Some things he eats leave him vomitting everything out again. Poison that never manages to kill him. The freezing cold makes him slower but it doesn’t kill him. The antlers of an angered deer leave him bleeding out but don’t kill him.

Hidan is seven years old and knows pain.

***

He startles awake and hits his wrist on the wall as he does. It helps, he finds. It doesn’t hurt but the dull ache grounds him immediately, reminds him where he is and calms him down.

The lamp light from Kakuzu’s night table is still on, he notices then and rolls to his side to face the other bed. According to the nightsky outside it’s late but not midnight yet. Kakuzu has reached the last pages of the newspaper.

“When I was seven, my village was attacked,” Hidan says, voice heavy with sleep, “I don’t even remember most of it. I guess Konoha and Kumo were at war and Yugakure just happened to be in the middle of it, if that makes sense. I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. _Shit_ , I don’t remember anything that happened. I don’t know if it was Konoha nin or Kumo nin. Both, I guess.” He knows he’s rambling but he can’t stop it, doesn’t want to. “Everyone died and Konoha- Kumo- whoever, they just left. I was still alive though. That’s why-”

Kakuzu is still looking down at his newspaper. He hasn’t moved since Hidan started talking.

Hidan rolls on his back. “That’s why- the nightmares. I guess even someone like me can still get fucked up by something like that.”

“It’s fine, Hidan. Go back to sleep.”

Hidan flinches at the tonelessness in those words. He turns to face the wall only to see his own silhouette thrown there by Kakuzu’s lamp. “Fine. Got it. Didn’t mean to interrupt your reading.” Kakuzu hasn’t been reading at all while Hidan talked and Kakuzu knows that Hidan noticed that.

Hidan stays awake despite his best efforts to force himself to sleep.

The light is switched off as Kakuzu settles to sleep.

Hidan turns to watch his silhouette. It takes a while for his breathing to even out but Hidan knows he’s still awake too.

“Hey. Thanks.” Hidan isn’t used to this at all. “For listening, and for the- for the food.”

“Go to sleep.”

It makes Hidan smile a little.


	8. Chapter Eight

The times that Kakuzu wants to kill him become rarer as they travel deeper into the Land of Earth. Hidan has taken to walk next to him now that he doesn’t have to worry about getting smacked over the head or punched into the nearest tree. They’re walking in companionable silence now even though there are unspoken things hanging over them, none of them speak them out loud and instead there’s a silent agreement to stay quiet about it altogether.

Hidan wants to talk about his village and Kakuzu wants to know about him. Hidan doesn’t talk and Kakuzu doesn’t ask him to.

Maybe the silence isn’t so companionable after all.

The Land of Earth is a land of canyons, marked by rivers that dug themselves deep into the earth and then mostly dried out. There are villages built into the cliffs sometimes. One small city they travel through was built in its entirety on a bridge reaching over a deep valley of a particularly large canyon.

“This is fucking cool,” Hidan says, leaning over the railings. Underneath the platform it’s a wide fall until he would hit the ground. “You know I could survive that.”

Kakuzu turns away and keeps walking. They won’t be staying here. “That would slow us down.”

“So if we weren’t on a mission, you’d let me?” Hidan grins.

“Absolutely not.”

“Aw, ‘Kuzu, I _did_ grow on you.”

“I’m not stitching together the mass of goo you’d end up being.”

“No, you would do that,” Hidan replies just to mess with him, “Hey, I’d end up as goo. What else?”

Kakuzu glances down the cliff then back at Hidan. “All your bones would be broken.”

“All of them? Really?”

“I don’t like the tone of that.”

Hidan leans over the railings again at the next opportunity when Kakuzu has found a cheap store to buy supplies for the road. When he comes out again, Hidan reaches for his bag. Kakuzu lets him but still wonders. “What are you doing?”

“Aren’t there any bounties here?” Hidan asks when he fishes out the bingo book. He hasn’t died by falling off an impossible height yet. It has to feel really good.

“Wouldn’t you need your symbol?”

“Oh.” Hidan stuffs the bingo book back into Kakuzu’s bag and sighs. “Then can I try on the way back?”

“Still no. Let’s go.”

They leave the city again. According to a map post they’ll still be on the road for a few more days until they reach Iwagakure. On the other side of the canyon the land is mostly hills filled with caves. There’s no grassland at all in this part of the world, not to mention no forests. Only dry trees that at some point in history resembled something like a forest. Truly a land of only earth.

For the night Kakuzu finds them a cave that protects them from the weather and enough dry twigs that they can get a small fire started.

“So,” Hidan says, “did I grow on you?” It’s not an entirely serious question but still too truthful not to hide with a grin.

Even when they’re camping outside, Kakuzu never tires of his ritual of reading until late into the night. This time it’s an old book he carries around and already falls apart, with some pages loosely tugged between others. It will be nothing but a mess of old brittling paper soon. “I tolerate you.”

Hidan scoots closer with his sleeping bag. “Only tolerate?”

“Only tolerate.”

“No, I think it’s a little more than that,” Hidan says.

Kakuzu shuts his book and looks down to him. His mask is pulled down revealing the exasperated scowl he usually wears around Hidan. “You’re interesting.”

Hidan grins wider. “There we go.”

“You’re infuriating,” Kakuzu says, “Your immortality is why I keep you around. Don’t get the wrong idea.”

“Sure.” Hidan makes a point by scooting even closer until he can plant his head on Kakuzu’s thigh and grinning when Kakuzu doesn’t push him off right away. “Hey, you wanna know about me?”

Kakuzu opens his book again and raises it so he doesn’t have to look at Hidan. “It’s not like I can stop you from talking.”

“You could choke me?” Hidan offers.

“No, you’d like that.”

“Is that why you stopped punching me when I annoy you? ‘Kuzu, you’re so observant.” That at least earns him a smack on the forehead with the back of Kakuzu’s book. He spreads his arms out theatrically. “It all began when I was seven-”

“And your village was assaulted, I know.”

“And my village was assaulted,” Hidan continues, “It was some small village in the mountains of Yu. I had never left it until then and suddenly I was on my own, just going in whatever direction I thought the next village would be. I ate whatever I could find on the way and slept whereever I thought it was safest.” He died many times during these weeks, at least he should have. “A group of Yugakure nin found me on their way back from a battlefield. They had so many dead people with them. I think to them I was like a feral child because I didn’t talk much and fought everyone over my food rations.” He chuckles. Kakuzu doesn’t comment. “They went home to Yugakure. I stayed in an orphanage there for a while, then went to the shinobi academy, somehow got through it.”

He remembers some parts of that life fondly. He had a roof over his head, a place to return to. Even the exams weren’t that bad in retrospect, he’d cheated on most of them anyway. Telling Kakuzu – telling anyone – however, is strange. Around him is nothing to distract himself either, only the ceiling of the cave where the smoke from the fire gathers before it makes its way out and into the nightsky.

“Actually, they got us through because they needed more soldiers. We would- we would go to battlefields and the younger troops would get easier missions but still… it was...”

“It was war,” Kakuzu says what Hidan thinks.

“Yeah.” It comes out quiet, more a breath than a word. He’s good at suppressing most of his feelings but just now they bubble up. The images of more than just the village of blood come up before his eyes, like a floodgate has opened. The faces of his teammates flash past him multiple times and with each flicker their eyes go missing, their cheeks are streaked with blood, their mouths are twisted into a terrified scream. “And then it wasn’t anymore. For Yugakure peace came over night. At least that’s what it felt like. It became peaceful and quiet. Hey, what is Yugakure most known for?”

Kakuzu glances down at him like he’s not quite sure what kind of answer Hidan is expecting. “Hot springs and nature parks?”

“Exactly.” Hidan scowls. “After years of war that was just the end of it. They made killers out of so many of us and then they asked us to just leave all of that behind. Funny, right?”

Kakuzu makes a non-committed noise.

“I didn’t like that. Lots of the other shinobi didn’t like that, but I was the one that got away for the longest time.”

“The longest time? They did catch you?”

Hidan chuckles. “I was caught a lot. Always got away though. Okay, there was this one time where I didn’t but I’m getting to that now. So they caught me yet again but then this group showed up and slaughtered everybody. Except me. They came from the mountains in the north, pretty secluded. That’s how I found out about the way of Jashin.”

“You were saved by cultists,” Kakuzu states dryly.

Hidan waves a finger in his face. “Don’t talk about Jashin like that. It’s not a cult, it’s a religion.”

“What’s the big difference?”

“You’re despicable. I’m telling you my life story here and that’s the thing you get hung up on.”

“You were a child of war,” Kakuzu says, “There’s a lot of those out there.”

Hidan pouts. “Don’t say that as if I’m not special.”  
Kakuzu rolls his eyes and sets his book down. “No, you are. You’re the only one that ended up immortal.”

“Yeah, that’s really fucked up.” The words are out before he can stop them and leave himself and Kakuzu perplexed. The first thought he can grasp again is that Kakuzu still hasn’t pushed him off his lap. It places him in a weird spot between comfort and uneasiness.

Kakuzu just looks at him for a second that feels like forever, with that unreadable, always semi-scowling face of his. “Hidan.”

“Yeah?” He wants to sink into the ground. He’s said something wrong. He’s said something terribly wrong.

“Is there something you want to say?”

Hidan almost breathes out a sigh of relief. Kakuzu doesn’t pressure him into anything here. He doesn’t directly ask. He’s giving him a way to escape. The answer he gets is another grin that Hidan knows looks bad and fake. “Got your curious, huh? Maybe another time. I’m tired.” He rolls to his side and scoots away from Kakuzu again. He’s further away from their dying campfire that way but he pulls the sleeping bag up to his chin and pretends everything is fine. Tells himself that he doesn’t miss the warmth of Kakuzu’s body under him. Aggressively closes his eyes and tries to force himself to sleep.

There’ll be nightmares.

There’ll be nightmares and it still keeps him up anyways.

***

Kakuzu lets the fire die slowly until it’s nothing but embers that illuminate nothing anymore. He’s stopped reading when Hidan started talking and is just staring at the pages, only turning them to keep up the appearance. There are things in Hidan’s tale that don’t quite match up but he can’t put his finger on it.

Hidan is sleeping, back turned to him and sleeping bag pulled up to his ears against the cold. He’s calm. He seems like he’s calm.

When the first embers go out, Kakuzu takes that as his queue to go to sleep as well. Five hearts keep him warm enough even without a sleeping bag. There’s something more human, more grounding in using it, though. The feeling that he’s still normal enough to need these little things.

_That’s really fucked up._

Hidan’s words still echo in his head. The melancholy in them. The way Hidan’s eyes glazed over with something entirely unlike him. Kakuzu has never seen him sad during their entire time together, and now he knows with certainty that most of Hidan’s snark serves to disguise the tragedy of war that he was a part of.

Kakuzu turns his back to him and tries to sleep. The day’s travel catches up with him, the fatigue of overthinking what is going on with Hidan – because that’s what he’s doing: overthinking.

Just as sleep comes, Hidan’s sleeping bag rustles.

“Hey, ‘Kuzu, you still awake?” Hidan must have slept at least a little judging from the slur in his voice.

Kakuzu opts not to answer.

“Okay then. I guess not.” Hidan sounds tired. If Kakuzu didn’t know better he would say even defeated. “Fuck.”

There’s a long silence but Hidan’s breathing doesn’t fade out into sleep again. Neither does Kakuzu’s. He’s watching the very last embers of the fire die and bathe the cave in complete darkness.

“Hey, ‘Kuzu.” Hidan’s voice is trembling. It’s so unlike him that Kakuzu almost wants to punch him just to get Hidan to defiantly grin back at him. “Truth is...” His voice is shaking so hard that if Kakuzu didn’t know better would make him think he’s even crying. “Truth is I really want to die.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp, there it is.


	9. Chapter Nine

Iwagakure turns out to be even more impressive than the bridge city. It’s made in its entirety of stone like its buildings were carved directly from the mountain itself. They are shaped like towers, connected to each other by bridges. The surrounding mountain range is high and rocky, hostile to anyone that doesn’t know their way around the perimeters. The afternoon sun throws large shadows over the city.

Deidara could have talked about the village for hours and it wouldn’t have come close to what Hidan is overlooking now. Everything is grand and strong, begging to be taken down by something so much larger than them.

“We’re early,” Kakuzu says over the wind that’s tearing at their cloaks where they look down on the city. “The ceremony to seal the Four-Tails is tomorrow.”

“What are we gonna do until then? Go into the city?”

Kakuzu shakes his head. “We’ll have to camp outside again. It’s better when we’re not being seen in the city at all.”

Hidan’s shoulders slump in disappointment. “Boring.”

Kakuzu looks directly at him and something hard in that gaze makes Hidan freeze in place and stare right back.

“What?”

“You can come back in a few years when all of this business is over,” Kakuzu says.

Hidan raises a brow. “I guess I can, yeah.”  
“Then you should do that.”

“I guess so. I wanna know what it’s like. We’re definitely gonna come back.” He hopes that Kakuzu will comment on the “we” part but he doesn’t. Instead he turns away and waves Hidan to follow him as he starts looking for a place to hideout for the night.

They find it in the form of yet another cave. Hidan feels like he can already rank the caves in the Land of Stone by cosiness. He’s already sick of it, sick of sleeping outside, and he craves a comfortable bed again, no matter how cheap the inn turns out to be. Instead he has to settle into his sleeping bag next to a small fire. Kakuzu insisted that they only kept them small to quickly warm up a little. His five hearts kept him warm and Hidan wouldn’t die from cold temperatures anyway. Hidan has repeatedly called him miserly for that.

“There’s a plaza remote from the rest of the city. That’s where they’ll extract the Four-Tails to give it a new vessel.”

Hidan groans. “Isn’t the plan just to wait that out and then attack when they’re all out of chakra and the vessel is unconscious?”

“Essentially, yes,” Kakuzu agrees, “Knowing you, though, I want to make sure you really understand it. This is more important to Akatsuki than the bounties.”

Hidan rolls onto his side to face Kakuzu who is sitting with his back against the cave wall and already has his torn book in hand again. “That’s big coming from you. Must really be important then.”

“It is,” Kakuzu insists, “Another important thing, Hidan. The vessel needs to stay alive.”

Hidan props his chin up on his hand. “’Kuzu, you know I hate fights when I’m not allowed to kill anyone. It’s against Lord Jashin’s rules to fight with the intention of letting anyone live.”

Kakuzu only shrugs. “If the vessel is unconscious you’re not fighting it.”

“If you phrase it like that.” Hidan scoots closer to Kakuzu. “Hey, I’m bored.”

“I won’t tell you any stories again. I’m trying to read.”

Once he’s close enough, Hidan lays his head down on Kakuzu’s lap again. “I’m cold.”

“There’s a fire right there.”

Hidan sighs heavily. Of course, Kakuzu is looking right through his excuses; it’s not like Hidan is subtle either. “I’m hard.”

Kakuzu shoves him off and knocks his head hard against the solid ground. There’s a crunch in the back of his head and the impact rattles through his skull. His teeth crash into each other, blood sprays from his nose. Kakuzu’s voice is far away for the moment. Whatever he says is probably meant to scold Hidan.

It takes a while until he’s no longer dizzy and the cracks in his skull mend themselves enough for him to regain most of his senses. “Fuck,” he breathes out. The remaining pain goes straight to his abdomen. He lied before to get any reaction out of Kakuzu but now it’s about to become a reality. He craves it, wonders what it would be like having Kakuzu pin him down roughly and hurting him as much as he likes. Hidan would take it all. “Fuck,” he says again, less breathlessly, and licks some of the blood from his upper lip. Kakuzu is somewhere above him, just barely inside his field of vision, and still pretending to read his damn book. “I was getting worried since when you were so peaceful but I’m glad you’ll still do this.”

“Shut up, Hidan.”

Hidan wipes his face with his sleeve. “No. Do it again!”

“You’re enjoying it.”

“Fuck yeah, I am, and you knew that beforehand. It’s why you stopped in the first place, remember?” Hidan grins with bloody teeth, the taste of metal on his tongue, and sits up to be at the same eye-level with Kakuzu. “Wanna know what I think?”

Kakuzu doesn’t look back him, makes a point of not giving Hidan what he wants. Stubborn bastard.

“I think you really like hurting me, and it’s because I can’t die and I heal quickly.” He allows himself to get still closer to Kakuzu’s face so he doesn’t have anything else to look at. “Wanna know what I also think? I think you’re really fucking frustrated. When was the last time you fucked someone? Because I bet it’s been a long time.”

“I think,” Kakuzu begins, “You’re being too full of yourself. Get off of me before I cut your head off.”

Hidan puts his arms around Kakuzu’s shoulders. “You’d do that?”

Kakuzu rolls his eyes.

“I’m messing with you. Don’t do that. But anything else you can do if you like.”

Kakuzu takes the elbow and wrist of one of Hidan’s arms and twists it, manouvering him off of him. The pain it inflicts is minimal, barely uncomfortable. “Shut up and go to sleep. We’ll need all our strength tomorrow.”

Hidan wraps himself into his sleeping bag, wills the heat in his abdomen to retreat and pushes down any thoughts he has about digging his fingers into scarred, stitched up skin while pain-turned-pleasure surges through him.

The plaza away from the city is as big as an open field. From what little Hidan knows about the size of tailed beasts, it seems appropriate. This way the Iwa nin can fit their troop on it with ease. They are dozens of jonin and anbu, the Tsuchikage himself and the two men that will exchange the Four-Tails in this. The older one needs to held up by two jonin and his head is lolling back and forth whenever he’s being moved. The other looks around the age of thirty and if Hidan remembers correctly from Deidara’s explanations his name is Roshi.

Kakuzu and him are situated at the edge of the plaza, on the rooftop of an abandoned warehouse and hidden behind a corner. Far away enough that sensor types don’t notice them but close enough that they can keep an eye on the ceremony.

The jonin and anbu keep a circle around the vessels while the Tsuchikage begins with the extraction. The earth vibrates with it, makes the rooftop shake under Hidan’s feet. Wind starts from the centre of the plaza and blows dust in his eyes. Even without being able to control or even feel his own chakra, Hidan sees the tight cloud of red build up around the former vessel. It is raw power surging up and cutting through the air, bigger than anything Hidan knows. This is much stronger than him, maybe even stronger than Kakuzu. If it is, it might even be able to kill him.

The chakra builds up and Hidan thinks that he can make out the vague shape of an ape-like figure from it. Its former vessel drops to the ground; from the distance it’s hard to tell whether the man is still alive. The younger meets the wave of chakra that’s about to be imposed on him with determination in his stance.

The wind changes direction as though something incomprehensibly big sucked in a breath. Bit by bit the giant cloud of chakra is pushed into Roshi’s body and for the longest time he doesn’t falter. His demeanor says it all; he’s been trained for this, he’s ready.

Hidan stretches. The ceremony will be over soon and then it’s his time to shine.

“Don’t kill the jinchuriki,” Kakuzu reminds him.

“Yeah, yeah.” But he wonders if the jinchuriki could kill him.

The wind lessens and becomes a mere breeze. Roshi’s body takes the last of the chakra, swallows it, and then doubles over when violent coughs shake through him.

Kakuzu shoots him an approving glance and Hidan takes the jump from the rooftop and readies his scythe. It’s been strangely long since they had last been in a fight. Since Takigakure’s shrine. Just as he’s charging towards the group of shinobi he notices how much he’s missed this during their weeks of just travelling. The anbu and jonin notice him come closer. Hidan watches a shadow pass over his head and then him, the closest group of shinobi, and the lightning mask all collide.

Hidan’s scythe catches multiple bodies in a single swing.

Knives bury themselves in his side.

Lightning rains down on all of them. Hidan fights through it, leaves the impact area and jumps for whichever poor soul is closest to him. Everything else around him happens fast: the Tsuchikage and anbu build a circle around Roshi and the former – now really dead, Hidan realises – vessel, the fire and wind mask appear above them and merge into one body, and Kakuzu’s form builds itself from the earth behind the group of Anbu and promptly begins throwing hard punches.

Hidan fights with his scythe in one hand and his spear in the other, attacking in all directions that he spots enemies in. His body pushes out the knives as his wounds begin closing, new ones flying right at him again. A jonin signs a quick series of seals and makes pillars of rock grow from the ground underneath Hidan’s feet. One hits him right in the jaw, makes his skull shake but it’s nothing against the strength of the fists that collide with the shinobi’s head when Kakuzu mows through the unprepared group of jonin, previously focused solely on Hidan.

There’s a group of anbu that Hidan chooses as his next target. They shoot rocks at him, harden their skin with their earth jutsu in anticipation of his attacks. Hidan cuts down the ones that aren’t as smart, evades the boulders aimed at him. He’s vaguely aware of the fire and wind mask fusion inhaling sharply behind him. He uses one of the rock pillars to jump off from and lands right between anbu struggling to turn around quick enough. The swing of his scythe comes at the same time as the ball of fire descending on them.

The world around Hidan turns loud from the roar of flames and screams of dying men. Hot blood hits his face as he keeps cutting through everyone in his way. It’s the best he’s felt in a long while, with burnmarks on his body and death on his fingertips.

The fire lets off and the mask fusion steers away for another group to attack. Hidan slams his spear into the eye of his last victim and searches the plaza for his next targets.

The Tsuchikage is standing alone, eyes closed and palms resting against each other, gathering chakra while half a dozen anbu guard him. Kakuzu’s mask creatures rain lightning and fire that only few escape from and he himself fights his way through an onslaught of jonin. His cloak has been discarded and for just a short moment Hidan allows himself to watch the display of brute muscle strength and destruction.

Hidan next aims for the anbu. Cuts down one who’s unprepared. The next he attacks parries his scythe, but not the spear, taking it right through the heart. Hidan wishes he could do his ritual but the speed of the battle doesn’t allow it. All the more souls he’ll have to send to Jashin after it is over.

Shortly after, he is splattered with wounds and blood that isn’t his own for the most part. Kakuzu finishes up the remaining jonin. They’re nothing but burnt and beaten up corpses.

Hidan breathes in the sight and goes for the Tsuchikage. Raises his scythe to strike down a hard blow.

He hits hard rock with a ringing clang, the impact vibrating through his arm. _A clone-_

The lightning mask pushes him to the ground just as a bright beam shoots over his head. Immediately he turns on his back, only to watch the mask creature disintegrate into nothing, swallowed by the beam and then it’s gone.

“Don’t underestimate me!” the Tsuchikage shouts, just as a new beam forms between his hands.

Hidan hears Kakuzu call his name but it sounds far away. He scrambles to his feet and then – doesn’t move at all.

Maybe he’s been wrong all this time. Maybe this right here is the thing that will kill him once and for all. He wonders what it feels like to be torn into the smallest parts of himself.

The beam comes.

The mask fusion pushes Hidan aside and takes the hit. Crumbles away right in front of his eyes. Kakuzu is next to him right after. “You fucking idiot! Focus!” The last mask, water, breaks from his back and spouts a tidal wave of foaming water in the direction of the Tsuchikage.

Kakuzu pulls Hidan to his feet and shoves him forward. They use the protection of the wall of water to round the Tsuchikage and close in on Roshi. The jinchuriki twitches on the ground, halfway conscious and aware of what is going around him.

Many things happen at once then.

The water goes down.

The Tsuchikage prepares another beam in his hands.

Roshi’s eyes widen and an overwhelming mass of chakra explodes from him.

Hidan is thrown through the air and desperately fishes for Kakuzu’s arm to cling on. He doesn’t find it, lands hard on broken up, rocky ground. His ribs break, pierce his lungs, make him spit blood. It doesn’t feel good. Not at all. Against the pain he rolls to his side, pushes himself up on his hands and knees. He finds Kakuzu a few feet away from him, coughing against breathlessness.

“Hey!” Frantically, Hidan crawls to him, catches sight of the water mask still holding its ground against the Tsuchikage and the Four-Tails now appearing in full form from the cloud of dark chakra. “Hey, ‘Kuzu. Come on!”

Kakuzu is with him again within the blink of an eye.

“Hey, what are we gonna do?” Because Hidan doesn’t know. He’s never had enemies like that before. A tailed beast and a kage. Somehow that seems much bigger than him.

Kakuzu watches the water mask battle against the tails of the giant ape figure of the Four-Tails. “We’re not winning this.”

“What are we gonna do?” Hidan asks again.

“We’re retreating, idiot!” Kakuzu is the first to get and drag Hidan onto his feet once more. “Go!” He pushes Hidan in the direction of their previous hideout before he signs multiple seals and hits the ground. Dust erupts from all cracks in the plaza and covers their escape. Through it the water mask returns to him. 

Hidan doesn’t think that he’s ever run this hard in his life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have nothing to say except Kakuzu's masks' powers should have been shown way more in canon because I think they're really cool.


	10. Chapter Ten

Later Hidan won’t know how much distance they’ve brought between them and Iwagakure. He only knows that they’re in the middle of rocky wasteland, far away from everything, and that Kakuzu deems it safe enough to stop.

Hidan collapses to the ground. His body is burning with aches that have nothing pleasurable to them. His feet have blisters and his lungs sting with every breath he takes.

Kakuzu doesn’t look better. He lets himself slide down the nearest wall of rock and takes deep breaths. His body doesn’t hold itself together at some of his stitched scars. Underneath the black threads of his body pulsate with the effort to calm down again. Similarly, Hidan becomes aware of his own heart pounding against his ribs that finally get enough rest to properly heal up.

They don’t start a fire that night, don’t talk, just fall asleep where they are and wake up early again. Hidan bites back any comments that come to his mind. Even he can tell that Kakuzu is too shaken up to take them with what little humour he possesses.

For days they just walk. Hidan only has a vague idea of where they are but he knows that they’ll leave the Land of Earth eventually, he trusts that Kakuzu will lead them somewhere where they can lick their wounds, mend their broken egos.

They leave the mountains one afternoon and descend into grassland again, sleep in a small forest between young trees. Civilisation still seems far away.

“This is bad, right?” Hidan says one morning as they eat the rest of their rations. Not that he needs food but Kakuzu does. With every day he looks paler.

“Bad is an understatement,” Kakuzu spits between bites, then swallows the rest of the dry meat, “We have to tell the leader.”

“Right.” Hidan hasn’t thought about the organisation at all. He doesn’t care for them at all, just a single one of them. “Right, we need to do that.”

They don’t do it immediately. For a few more days they travel through the country. That’s when Pain comes to them, a loud, demanding voice in their heads. “The extraction of the One-Tail begins.”

So Deidara and Sasori were successful in their mission.

Hidan exchanges a look with Kakuzu and they reach a silent agreement.

The extraction takes another three days. Hidan hates it, every single second that he has to force himself to concentrate, to pretend that he’s concentrating while the water mask helps him direct his chakra to where it needs to go. The biggest part of him just feels bad for Kakuzu who has to work for two here.

Once the One-Tail is fully extracted, they watch the Ten-Tails open one eye. Its entire figure is huge and imposing, so much more massive than the Four-Tails could ever be. The part of him that isn’t worried about Kakuzu is scared of that thing.

When it’s over and they’re back with only themselves to keep each other company, Kakuzu collapses from the strain of draining his chakra supplies almost completely. He recovers from it, does so faster than most people, but Hidan already decided that he doesn’t like the sight of a weakened Kakuzu at all.

When they tell Pain, the backlash doesn’t come.

“I’ll send Kisame and Itachi,” he just says, “The Two-Tails is in Kumogakure. This is your new mission, your second chance.” And his tone alone says that he won’t tolerate failure again. Hidan wants to shout back at him, tell him that he can go and try to kill the two of them but he bites it back, swallows it down. “But before that I must ask you to return to Amegakure. There is something that requires your attention.”

When they’re alone again, Hidan leans against Kakuzu’s shoulder.

“He already knew,” Kakuzu says.

“Did he?”

“I’d be more surprised if he didn’t.”

“Hm.” For another minute – maybe hour, who knows? - neither of them talk. They’re somewhere in a forest in the Land of Grass and it’s quiet. “So we’re going to Amegakure?”

Kakuzu nods and doesn’t move.

“Hey, are you dying?” Hidan does his best to make it sound like he’s joking but not even for a second does he pretend that he’s succeeding.

“You wish.”

“I don’t.”

They fall back into silence. That night Hidan sleeps with his head still resting on Kakuzu’s shoulder and feeling every breath he takes.

The next evening they finally reach a small village. Hidan pickpockets money for them that Kakuzu uses in gambles until they have enough to get clothes that aren’t torn beyond recognition. Afterwards they still have enough to rent a room in the village’s cheapest inn. The room is too small for even just one person and there is only one bed but for just one night it will do. Hidan’s first act is to retreat to the bathroom down the hallway and take a bath.

Once he feels like a person again, he comes back to their room to find Kakuzu already lying in bed with his back turned to the door.

Hidan settles down next to him. “Hey, you still awake?”

A low hum is his answer.

“Sorry,” Hidan says quietly, “About your hearts.”

“You should be,” Kakuzu growls.

“I am. Really. It’s my fault.”

“Damn right.”

“I know you’re angry but I’m really sorry, okay?” Hidan’s just talking to Kakuzu’s back and in the back of his mind he knows that right now it’s fruitless to try and talk to him at all.

To his surprise, Kakuzu turns around. He’s angrier than Hidan has ever seen him, threatening even, fury in his eyes. “You didn’t listen at any point. Deidara told us about the Tsuchikage and about the Four-Tails, but you didn’t listen at all to what they said. Not to a single fucking word! Yes, this is entirely your fault. This whole mission could have been a success if you hadn’t tried to attack the fucking tsuchikage when the biggest available source of chakra was just behind him.”  
“I’m sorry.”

“I lost three hearts to keep you from being torn into bits,” Kakuzu continues, nothing stopping his rant, “Three. I almost lost the fourth one. I risked draining my supplies completely trying to cover up for you. This isn’t a joke, Hidan, do you understand?”

“I do. I’m sorry.” Hidan knows that Kakuzu carried this anger around for the whole time since Iwa, shrinks under the knowledge that it’s directed at him.

“I don’t think you do.”

“What else do you want me to say?”

“Why didn’t you dodge?”

“Huh?” That question was something Hidan didn’t see coming.

“The Tsuchikage’s particle style. Why didn’t you dodge?”

Oh, this is really bad. Hidan’s mouth goes dry and he chokes on his own words, realising that he has nothing to say. It can’t be. Kakuzu was asleep when he said it. He didn’t hear it. “You’re telling me I’m not a good fighter.”  
By now they’re both sitting up in the bed and Hidan wants to leave. Kakuzu rolls his eyes. “That’s not what this is about and you know that.”

“What then?” Hidan throws his arms in the air. “I can leave if you want to. You just have to tell me, asshole! If you don’t want me around-”

“Then leave!”

Somehow that hurts more than any wound ever could. The words crash Hidan under them and wordlessly he leaves the bed, gathers what little belongs to him and before he is completely aware of it he’s out in the streets.

***

Kakuzu regrets the words as soon as he said them. They both fall into speechlessness and so he can only watch as Hidan actually does leave and slams the room’s door behind him. The world is suddenly very cold.

Hidan is running from him. Avoids all questions he is asked just to never admit to Kakuzu’s face what he really wants.

That coward is running. Kakuzu won’t follow him. He never followed a coward and he doesn’t intend to start now. Whereever Hidan goes is none of his business.

He doesn’t find sleep that night.

***

Hidan doesn’t want to be anywhere near that inn. Instead he wanders around the village, goes out into the busiest streets and lets himself dwell there for a while. Even late in the evening there are still families out here, men going out to drink while their wives meet up for a chat. Hidan wants to kill them all. He wants to drown these streets in red. He hasn’t offered Jashin any souls lately, unable to do his ritual. He needs to-

Kakuzu wouldn’t like that.

He finds a billboard that wears the faces of some lowlife criminals, come chunin gone rogue. Most of them come from the surrounding lands and not the Land of Grass itself. Their bounties are barely worth looking at, by Kakuzu’s standards. Hidan rips off the poster with the person with the highest bounty and leaves to look for a place to sleep. In the end, he stays the night in the least dirty alleyway the village has to offer.

When he visits the inn the next day, he learns that Kakuzu left.

The bounty’s name is Megumi and he’s worth fifteen million ryo, only half of what Hidan is worth. Apparently he calls himself a bounty hunter too. From the photo he seems like a cocky show-off who knows one or two ninjutsu and managed to impress some village idiots enough to get him such a sum on his head. He’s built thin like a stick and his eyes are too big and round to fit the rest of him.

Hidan finds him a few villages over, heading south. It’s a small village with only two streets that meet in a crossroad and nothing more. There’s a bar with bright lights in the windows and faint music reaching the outside. Bars are a good place to start looking for people. Kakuzu would have found another way to go about it but he isn’t here to smack Hidan over the head for his stupid ideas.

Sure enough, he finds Megumi immediately, sitting at the bar and downing what looks like his third drink that night.

Hidan takes the seat next to him. “You’re not from around here.”

Megumi looks him up and down, his eyes still surprisingly clear. He can hold his liquor well. “Neither are you.”

“I heard your head is worth fifteen million.” Hidan cuts right to the chase. There’s not enough people around to notice what they’re talking about. It’s better that way.

“You can try and get it,” Megumi says, “But you’ll fail.”

Hidan punches him in the face. He won’t even need weapons for this. “Come again?”

The fight quickly moves outside. Megumi turns out to know more than just one or two jutsu and blasts Hidan throw a window, shards digging into his body. From then everything happens fast. Megumi is above him quickly, using wind style, and rams Hidan’s head into the ground. Maybe it would have hurt more if the guy had been fully sober. Hidan won’t find out, fights back the dizziness.

Too self-confident, Megumi digs into the inside of his jacket and pulls out a bingo book. “Ah!” he declares triumphantly, “Thirty million. That’s a lot, but you really got too cocky, huh?”

Hidan grabs for him but Megumi is already gone again and signs another seal that steals the breath right from Hidan’s lungs. His lungs collapse into themselves, he chokes on blood. The world slowly becomes black.

He starts to understand that the guy has become a mildly successful bounty hunter.

His conscious fades away.

He wakes up in the back of a cart, with his hands and feet tied together, and staring at Megumi’s back.

“You took your damn time waking up.”

“Fuck you! Where are we going?” He tries to find the sun above him but the light is still blinding.

“South,” Megumi answers, “Well, me anyway. I’m gonna take you to the next bounty station. You’re a really weird one. I stabbed you multiple times and you didn’t even flinch.”

Hidan sighs a breath of relief. They’re still going south. He’s still on track. “Knocked me out good.”

He uses the rest of the time to rest. It’s afternoon when they reach the bounty station Megumi talked about. It’s a strange sight. A small hut for an entrance and behind it a warehouse like the belly of a wasp. Megumi pushes him inside, only undoing the restraints on his feet enough that he can walk on his own.

The bounty exchange master is a middle-aged man with a strong build and a serious face, the kind that Kakuzu trusts to keep business discreet. Megumi and him talk like they know each other.

“This guy should be worth thirty million,” Megumi says.

The other man flips a few pages in the bingo book until he finds Hidan’s face and checks his appearance. Hidan hasn’t changed much since he was seventeen. “He’s not dead,” he simply comments.

“I’m hard to kill,” Hidan says helpfully.

“Tried suffocating him, tried stabbing him. Really hard to kill,” Megumi agrees, “Maybe you can sell him again. You’ll probably get back the money quickly.”

The bounty master leaves for the back room and returns with a suitcase of money. “It’s the last cash I have around right now. You’re lucky.”

Megumi doesn’t even count the money like Kakuzu would have. “Thanks. I’ll see you around.” He leaves.

The bounty master pushes Hidan out another door and into a hallway. Left and right are barred doors, a cell block for alive captives like him. Like hell he is staying here.

Megumi was a massive idiot if he thought Hidan could be restrained by ropes. His hands are free with one tear that makes the ropes dig into his flesh until they hit bone and finally snap. His own blood washes over his hands but Hidan doesn’t care for that. He gets a grip on the perplexed man and slams his head against the nearest wall. The bounty master goes down with nothing more, his skull cracked open and bleeding out on the floor. Hidan finds a pocket knife on him and cuts up the ropes around his ankles.

Megumi hasn’t come far, doesn’t see it coming, has a knife in his back before he knows what hit him. He falls off his cart and Hidan catches up to him.

“Tried suffocating me, tried stabbing me. You really thought I’m not getting back at ya.”

Megumi stumbles over his words, contorts his face into a horrified grimace. Hidan puts a heel on his palm before he can reach for a kunai. He’s not stupid. He can practically smell all the metal of hidden weapons on him. With a little more pressure the bones in Megumi’s palm break, the sound is satisfying. Hidan grins again for the first time of what feels like a really long time.

“Don’t think I’ll kill you that quickly.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, Megumi. Bye, Megumi.


	11. Chapter Eleven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has smut. Consensual but also kinda violent/bloody because it's these two.

Kakuzu’s room in the inn is the last down a long hallway and one of only few occupied rooms at all. The cheapest of the cheap, somewhere in the outskirts of Kusagakure. Hidan had to threaten the desk clerk into giving him the room number and keeping quiet about his arrival and the body he carries with him. Megumi is slung over his shoulder, a ball of cloth shoved into his mouth to keep him quiet. Brown blood from the stab wounds to his arms and legs has dried in his clothes. Somehow Hidan had to keep him from running and fighting. He raises his hand to knock but before he can do that, the door opens and Kakuzu drags him inside so suddenly that he drops Megumi.

“How did you find me?”

Hidan has missed that growling voice. “I’m not entirely stupid, you know?” Through all the time they spent travelling together Hidan picked up one or few things about the kind of places Kakuzu favours. Finding him has only been a little bit of trial and error.

“I told you to leave. You told me to tell you to leave.”

“Yeah, but you’re also not getting rid of me so easily, remember?” Hidan cocks an eyebrow.

“What the fuck is up with you?” Kakuzu hisses, then notices that Megumi is still alive, “Who is that?”

Hidan holds up the suitcase he carried in his other hand. “That’s thirty million ryo right here. And that guy? Really good wind style user. Also worth fifteen million. It’s my peace offering.”

Kakuzu gapes at him and Hidan can’t even see his mouth under the mask to properly laugh at it. This – stunning Kakuzu into silence – is something he can now pride himself with.

“I take it you accept this apology?”

Kakuzu doesn’t answer that but walks up to Megumi to examine him. Megumi shrinks into himself a little more, cowering pathetically on the floor. Without the cloth in his mouth he might have begged for his life, he does it with his eyes, but it doesn’t reach Kakuzu. With one swift hit he punctures the man’s chest and Hidan watches him rip the heart clean out, still beating in his grasp. The cloth in Megumi’s mouth soaks in red while he bleeds out on the floor.

Kakuzu shrugs his cloak off. On his back there is the water mask and next to it Hidan spots the fire mask. “You’ve been busy too.” One more and he’d be back to full strength, full flexability.

“I was,” Kakuzu confirms. The stitches in his arm open up and threads reach for the beating heart and suck it under the skin. Hidan watches the pulsating knot travel up Kakuzu’s arms and shortly after a new mask crystallises on his back.

“Are you still angry?”

Kakuzu turns to him, eyes hard, unforgiving. “I am.”

Hidan sighs. “I already gave up a perfect sacrifice for Jashin. I sold myself for my bounty. What else do you want me to do?”

“Why didn’t you dodge?”

“That again?” His heartbeat goes faster. He doesn’t want to answer that. Doesn’t even want to look at Kakuzu. That last part is stupid and he knows that himself. He’s chased him to this point and now he can’t even look at him.

Kakuzu realises that too. He reaches for Hidan’s face and grips his chin to make him look at him. His fingers are still bloody and leave smears on his face. Hidan’s breath hitches.

“I think...” he starts carefully, more to test how his words come out than actual nervousness. “I think I wanted to see if that could kill me.”

“You want to die.”

So Kakuzu hadn’t been sleeping. He had heard every word Hidan said that night. It throws a shadow over everything that happened in the last weeks. It’s scary and everything dark that Hidan never wanted anyone to know. Not Kakuzu, maybe not even really himself. Looking back, he can’t even say why he said it in the first place, why he would even tell the silence.

It’s all bullshit.

He knows exactly why.

“Yeah, I- I want to die.” He reaches up and holds onto Kakuzu’s wrist, also wet with blood. “I really want to die. I want to know what it’s like.”

Kakuzu only looks at him for a long moment. Then “You’re fucked up.”

It makes Hidan laugh. This is more like they used to be, he likes that much better. “Maybe, but you’re just as fucked up then.”

“I’m gonna kill you.”

“I was hoping you’d say that.” Hidan reaches further up to pull down Kakuzu’s mask and see the everlasting frown there. It’s something good. Something normal between them, making it easier to say what he wants to say. “Kakuzu.” If he can choose, it has to be him. “Kill me.”

Kakuzu crashes their lips together. It’s hard and bruising and better than Hidan could have imagined. They kiss like they mean it. More blood smears over Hidan’s chin and where Kakuzu digs his fingers into his cheeks to hold him in place. Hidan shoves his hood fully off to bury a hand in Kakuzu’s hair and bring them closer together. His lips are bitten bloody and he loves it.

Loves it even more when he’s pushed back and his back hits the mattress of the small bed of the room. Kakuzu is over him in the blink of an eye and shoves his tongue into his mouth like it belongs there. And who is Hidan to deny him? They kiss until they’re both breathless, gasping in each other’s air.

“Finally got you to loosen up, huh?” Hidan teases. It earns him a sharp, stinging slap in the face. “ _Ow!_ ”

“Shut up, you like it.”

“Fuck yes, I do.” He wraps his arms around Kakuzu’s shoulders and pulls him down enough so that he can kiss him again, bite at his lips and along the stitches on his face. His cloak is pushed off and thrown to the ground in a hurry and he can drag his hands over Kakuzu’s back again. Feel the muscle, fingers brushing over rough stitching and sliding into his hair again. Kakuzu is a solid, warm weight on him and he never wants to get rid of it. They’re both hard, pressing against each other, swallowing each other’s groans.

Hidan whines when Kakuzu lifts off him but then a grin tugs at his mouth when the other begins to tug his trousers down. His cock is painfully hard and resting on his stomach. More than willingly he spreads his legs so Kakuzu can settle between them and reaches for the front of his trousers to undo them. He licks his palm and then Kakuzu is hot, thick and hard in his hand. Kakuzu growls low in his throat.

“Been a while,” Hidan says but even he doesn’t really remember the last time he’s fucked someone. Right now he also doesn’t want to think about anything that isn’t Kakuzu.

His lips have healed again and Kakuzu shuts him up by kissing them bloody again, digging a hand into Hidan’s hair and pulling hard. Hidan arches his head back so Kakuzu can lay biting kisses on his neck and each time feels better than the last. Desperate for every touch he can get out of this. “Just fuck me already – _shit!_ ”

Kakuzu pulls his hand off and shoves it hard against the headboard. Threads snake out from the stitches on his arm and wrap around Hidan’s fingers. Only to then pierce his skin, dig between the bones and sew him to the wood. Hidan bites back his hissed moans. The pain goes right to his cock. His hand runs warm from spilt blood dripping down onto the bed sheets right next to his head. The other one he bites himself to keep his noises down until he tastes even more of his own blood.

He only vaguely registers Kakuzu lining up with his hole but once he pushes in with one harsh thrust, Hidan becomes fully aware of it. He cries out at it, throwing his head back and his free hand flying to grip the bed sheets. It stings. Feels like getting stabbed from the inside. Makes him feel light-headed and dizzy, warm and full. His heart feels like it wants to burst out of his ribcage.

“Hurts?”

Hidan nods sharply. It takes another moment until he’s caught his breath again and trust himself to speak. “Hurts really good.”

Kakuzu doesn’t wait for anything more and set a fast and hard pace that knocks the breath out of Hidan’s lungs with every thrust. The pain comes in waves, washing over him and taking over every single part of his body, from his fingertips to his toes curling, and turning into tingling pleasure along the way. His moans are breathy and quiet, needy when he tries to move his hips to meet Kakuzu’s but is pushed down. The best part isn’t even the delicious mix of pain and pleasure. It’s seeing Kakuzu like this, constant scowl softened into concentration, eyes fixed solely on Hidan and beads of sweat on his forehead.

Hidan tangles his free hand into the ends of Kakuzu’s hair, soft and light, and then drags his finger nails down his chest, catching onto lines of stitches and he wants to bite that. Wants to run his tongue along them. Another time, though. Heat is pooling in his abdomen and his body is crying for release.

“Harder-”

He can’t even fully end his one-word demand because Kakuzu pulls out and turns Hidan on his stomach. Hidan cries out at the twist it puts on his sewn on hand and wrist but it’s choked from him when Kakuzu puts a hand on his neck and presses down. A pleasure-crazed grin twitches in Hidan’s face. This is so much better than he could have imagined.

Kakuzu pushes him up on his knees and buries himself inside him again with one hard thrust. Hidan bites his hand out of reflex and then it’s pulled away from him and twisted onto his back. New threads dig into his flesh and sew it to his back, right between his shoulder blades. With every thrust shaking his body the stitches tear at his skin and pull it open and bloody. The whole position is uncomfortable and painful, puts him completely at Kakuzu’s mercy and Hidan would give everything to stay this way.

“Ah, _fuck_ – keep going...”

Kakuzu grips his hips so firmly it will end up bruised and fucks him hard, every thrust deep and aiming for the spot that will make Hidan scream. It does. Hidan buries his face into the pillow but even then Kakuzu catches his hair again and pulls it back, making Hidan arch his back. Everything is painful pleasure and he loves every second of it.

He comes with a loud moan, his orgasm making his body tighten. His hands clench where they are sewn and the threads dig into his fingers and palm. Behind his eyes the world erupts into hot white pleasure that leaves him dizzy, warm and buzzed. Kakuzu pulls out and finishes on his back with a content sigh.

Hidan only fully returns to himself when his body slumps down on the mattress when the threads from his hands are removed. Shortly after, damp cloth cleans his body while the punctures on his palms and shoulder are left to heal by themselves. The process stings but watching the wounds on his hands close grounds him again, pulls him back to reality, and he rolls onto his back.

“That was fucking great. Hey, come back here.”

Kakuzu rinses out the now dirty piece of cloth in the single sink the room has. The inn is so cheap that the rooms don’t even have their own bathrooms. Very like Kakuzu to choose it when he probably expected to spend the night here alone. With a glance at Hidan he drops the cloth and instead goes on to throw his trousers at him before putting on his own again.

Hidan’s whole body is too sore to move and he barely manages to sit up. “Aw, come on.”

“Since when are you so clingy?”

“Call it the bliss after sex or whatever. Come back here. I can’t move.”

Kakuzu rolls his eyes but finally walks up to Hidan. Once he’s close enough Hidan wraps his arms around his waist and wrestles him down onto the bed.

“Can’t move, my ass,” Kakuzu grumbles.

Hidan smirks and settles down against Kakuzu’s side, fingers tracing stitches. His heart skips a beat with the realisation that he likes Kakuzu, really likes him. More than that, he trusts him. Kakuzu puts an arm around his shoulders to keep him close.

“Does this mean I’m forgiven?”

“Don’t test your luck.”

“Testing my luck just got me laid.”

Kakuzu swats at his head and Hidan just cuddles up to him more, too blissed out to take offence. He’s forgiven and he knows that without hearing the words.

***

Like this Hidan looks as human as someone like him can. With sweat damp hair glowing almost white in the moonlight, Kakuzu takes a moment to just look at him.

“I know I’m handsome but your staring is getting creepy,” Hidan says.

It destroys the moment in a way that is so very like Hidan even though Kakuzu will deny that a moment was even what was happening. He rolls his eyes. “One day I’ll kill you.”

Hidan’s face lights up. “Is that a promise?”

“It’s a promise.”

Hidan’s face breaks out into a broad grin and he lifts himself enough so he can kiss him again. “Great! Wow, you really like me.”

“Shut up, Hidan. You’re annoying.”

“Yeah, yeah, of course.” He starts tracing fingers along the stitches, playfully tugging at some.

“Stop that smug grin before I wipe it off your face.”

“By kissing me more, I hope.”

“By crushing your skull.”

Hidan settles down again with an arm and a leg slung around Kakuzu and face buried between his neck and shoulder. “Who’s the fucked up one now?”

Kakuzu listens to Hidan’s breathing even out. Having him close again is calming. It’s only been a few days that they were separate but he can’t help but feel relieved.

On his own the need to watch his back was more troubling. Only carrying one heart and not having Hidan to guard him induced a sense of paranoia in him that he hadn’t had for decade. Kakuzu knows his faults, he knows that he’s quick to anger and not easy to get along with, but he is by no means careless when it comes to his own safety. Unlike Hidan.

Then again Hidan is the complete opposite of him. Loud and reckless, charismatic in a twisted way that captures people’s attention for maybe all the wrong reasons, in a way that doesn’t even make him particularly likeable.

But it is easy to like Hidan, he thinks, at least for him. Yet more than anything Kakuzu is still curious about him. About the things that made him become who he is now.

He shifts on his side, Hidan’s limbs still tightly wrapped around him and unwilling to let go even while he is fast asleep. It’s been decades since Kakuzu had someone like that on his side. Once more he remembers Kimiko. It’s rare that he does, let alone thinking about her twice within just a few months. After all, she was the smallest part of the life he had once. She was there, barely worth remembering, and still he finds himself in this spot.

Over the course of the night, Kakuzu doesn’t find sleep and only dozes off every now and then while he tries. It’s the novelty of it all that he blames his sleeplessness on, nothing more. He blames the smell of a corpse. He also blames the moon, too bright at the nightsky, and this room’s window isn’t even facing it.

The thing that fully rips him away from any chance of sleep is Hidan startling awake. His hands clenching where they rest around Kakuzu with fingers digging into him. Then his eyes rip open wide and he stares at nothing for a while, cold sweat on his forehead, trying to control his breathing.

“Shit,” he whispers to no one.

Only when Kakuzu drives a hand through his hair does he even notice he’s there.

“Oh, hey.” He sounds tired. “Did I wake you up? Sorry.”

“I was awake,” Kakuzu says.

“Oh.” Hidan relaxes only slightly and leans their foreheads together. “Hey, I’m not gonna sleep anymore. Let’s leave.”

They do just that. In the middle of the night, the silence of the village no one notices them leave behind the small inn and a mangled body with a missing heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What I learnt from writing this chapter is that I personally am not a smut writer and I applaud everyone who is good at it.  
> The story is now also at its halfway point and there's still a lot about to happen that I'm very excited to write!


	12. Chapter Twelve

“Ugh, I hate it here,” Hidan says while he keeps attempting to walk closer to Kakuzu without their umbrella’s clashing. The rain falls hard around them, pattering loudly. It’s torn this and that way by strong winds and the deeper they walk into the land surrounding Amegakure the more pointless the umbrellas become. Their cloaks are already drenched and Hidan’s hair sticks to his neck. “Why did the leader have to build his base here of all places?”

Kakuzu shrugs.

Hidan pouts. “You better warm me up later. Not everyone has multiple hearts to keep himself warm.”

The city of Amegakure is a maze of high towers and rain gutters. The buildings are equipped with water ducts and the streets are flooded with rain. It doesn’t bother Kakuzu but Hidan steps into potholes, sinking to his ankles into water. “This city sucks.”

Pain’s tower is the largest in the city, with sculptured faces on top overlooking rooftops, their painted eyes staring at points somewhere far away. One face has its tongue stuck out. _Freaky._ The tower is connected to two smaller ones, looking just as grey as the city around them, tubes running along the length of them and leading the rain water underground. Inside the air is dry and warm. Hidan allows himself to breathe a sigh of relief when they can finally get rid of the umbrellas.

They walk up a few floors. Hidan catches sight of the outside through windows in the stairwells, wedged between strong metal tubes and allowing only a small field of vision. Seeing the city from above doesn’t change the greyness. It only makes the few people in the streets look even smaller.

Konan awaits them at the end of the first staircase, halfway up the tower. “This way, please.”

“Hello to you too,” Hidan mutters. He has learnt that he doesn’t like her calmness, her unwavering attitude. It’s no fun, unnerving instead. Kakuzu shoots him a glance and he stays quiet for the rest of the way. Konan leads them into a dimly lit hallway. All the doors look the same, the floors and walls are clean, free from any traces of the rain outside. Even the pattering is quiet here. Over the smell of rain in his clothes Hidan smells desinfectants.

“They’ve been doing well,” Konan says, “They might even be recovering too fast from their wounds for this to still make a difference.”

“We’ll see,” Kakuzu responds.

Konan opens the door of a room almost at the end of the hallway. The light in it is bright and cold, clinical. The walls are white, there are closets filled with sanitizers and medical equipment. Deidara lies in a bed in the corner, thrashing against bonds of paper wrapped securely around their torso. As soon as they notice Konan they start cursing. “Hey, let me go!”

Their arms are only bandaged stumps now, Hidan notices, ending shortly before where their elbows should be.

Konan pays them no mind and points at a box in one of the closets. “They’re still in good condition. I’ll leave you to it. The leader asked to talk to me.” She leaves without another glance at Deidara.

Deidara resigns to their bed once she’s gone. “Can you hurry up, hm?” Exhaustion visibly catches up with them. Their face is pale, from blood loss, Hidan guesses. Their hair is a mess and their face is sweaty.

“You got your ass beat, huh?”

“Shut up, Hidan,” Deidara and Kakuzu say at the same time.

“I always knew you were somewhat pathetic, but wow, look at you.” Hidan sits down at the edge of the bed. “How’d that happen?”

Deidara grits their teeth and turns to Kakuzu. “Will this take long?”

Kakuzu brings out the box of the closet. Its lid is see-through. Inside lie two arms, submerged into blueish liquid. When he opens it, the smell of chemicals stings in Hidan’s nose. “It will be quick.”

“It will sting a bit,” Hidan adds, “Well, a lot.”

There’s not much for him to do but watch as Kakuzu takes off Deidara’s bandages and begins stitching on the new set of arms to the stumps. The threads sew the limbs on with practiced skill. He notices the way Deidara is biting their cheek to keep themself quiet and suppressing the urge to flinch. “Don’t be a baby,” Hidan says anyways.

“You’re not the one who lost two arms, asshole,” Deidara hisses when Kakuzu moves on to the second arm, “Ow!”

Hidan watches the threads work on sewing, piercing skin and flesh. “How did it happen, though?”

Kakuzu finishes up his work when both arms are stitched on and searches the cabinets for desinfectant.

“Fought the kazekage.” Deidara shrugs with one shoulder, then the other, their arms still limp. “This one when I fought the copy ninja from Konoha.”

Hidan leans back against the wall and crosses his arms behind his head. “Weakling.” Deidara kicks at him but it’s nowhere near as insistent as they could be. They’ve become quieter.

“You’re dripping rain everywhere. Go away.”

“Make me.”

He gets two more weak, half-hearted kicks from Deidara until they sigh and look up at the ceiling. Kakuzu returns and dabs desinfectant over the newly sewn wounds. Apart from Deidara’s pained hisses, the room is quiet, the rain outside only faintly audible.

“Master Sasori is dead,” Deidara says then.

Hidan exchanges a look with Kakuzu. Compassion isn’t a strong suit of either of them.

“Let himself be killed,” Deidara goes on, “That madman just went and got himself killed. I don’t… I don’t understand. He was meant to be forever. He was going on and on about that, it was so annoying and… I don’t understand it at all.”

Hidan swats their leg. “Don’t start fucking crying. I’m gonna kill you if you do.”

The kick that earns him is stronger. In the same moment the paper bonds dissolve into individual floating sheets and disappear through the crack underneath the door. Deidara takes a deep breath and their fingers twitch with it.

“You’re gonna be fit again in no time,” Hidan says. It is the one encouraging thing he can honestly say. “Kakuzu’s really good at getting people back together.”

When Deidara lifts their arm it seems to obey them well enough already for them to sit up. Hidan guesses it has something to do with chakra control, something he doesn’t entirely understand but Kakuzu seems to expect this speedy recovery.

“There should be no further problems,” Kakuzu says.

Deidara’s face pulls into a pained grimace again. Lumps travel from their shoulders down their arms, threaten to stretch and snap the fresh stitches apart and then slide further down into their hands. Their palms rip open, blood dripping over their hands and onto the sheets. Then pink lumps of flesh worm out of the wound and white bones grow from the flesh. Teeth and tongues that begin to lick up the blood around the wound and when it’s clean, it looks fully healed.

“You’re all freaks,” Hidan says.

“I don’t want to hear that from you of all people,” Deidara retorts, rolling their shoulders and flexing their fingers. “Are we done here, hm?”

Kakuzu shrugs. “If you’re feeling alright.”

“I feel great.”

“Try not to get torn apart again,” Hidan teases.

Deidara gets up in a hurry and throws their cloak over their shoulders, stretching until their bones crack from what must have been days of being tied down to not hurt themself too much. “It’s the damn Uchihas’ fault. It’s always them ruining everything! Them and their… fucking sharingan.”

Kakuzu busies himself with putting the box and desinfectant away. A short glance at Hidan tells him that he can leave without him.

Deidara leaves the room quickly, like they don’t want to spend a second longer in there than they have to. Understandable. The restlessness is one of only few things they and Hidan have in common. Hidan follows them out, down the hallway and into a big room with a round table in the middle but otherwise empty.

“They made fun of my art,” Deidara keeps muttering, “I’m gonna show them true art. Gonna be the last thing they see.”

Hidan slings an arm around their shoulder and messes their hair up.

“Hey!”

“You’re spouting nonsense,” Hidan says, barely holding back his laughter. It’s not at all what Deidara means to say.

“Stop following me!”

“But it’s fun.”

“I hate you, hm!” They remove themself from under Hidan’s arm.

“Nah, you don’t. Not as much as you could.”

“Deidara.” It’s Zetsu that interrupts their squabbling. He grows from the wall, the flytrap around him opening up to reveal his black-and-white face. It’s not the weirdest thing Hidan has seen, not even on this day alone. Deidara shoves him off and walks up to Zetsu.

“I found your ring.”

“Thanks.”

Zetsu steps out of the wall completely, not even sparing Hidan a glance, and holds an arm out to point at another door. “We found a new partner for you, seeing as you have recovered so quickly.”

Hidan makes to follow them out but Zetsu shuts the door right in his face, leaving him behind in the big room. With nothing to do he slumps down in one of the chairs around the table and balances it on the two hind legs, staring at the ceiling.

The room must be somewhere in the deepest guts of the building. No noise of rain makes its way here and the only sound is the humming of the lights. It’s unnerving, having nothing around him. Hidan ignores that he’s bouncing his leg.

Sasori is dead. That shouldn’t even be surprising. Hidan hasn’t known him well but there has been some history between him and Suna. Whatever made him choose death had something to do with that, that much Hidan is sure of. But it isn’t Sasori that concerns him. He doesn’t even know what it is that does.

He’s alone with his thoughts and he doesn’t like that.

***

The village of blood is burnt into his mind and makes his head hurt like the fires are still going. Maybe it’s just the fever, induced by whatever poisonous berries he’s found this time. It hurts, it burns, it tears him apart from the inside. He wants to vomit but chokes on it, wants to walk but collapses when he tries. His body is stuck between repairing itself and falling apart from hunger.

He’s not dying.

None of the pain finally kills him.

***

Kakuzu’s footsteps come closer and then he lays a hand on Hidan’s shoulder. “Don’t sleep here.”

“Wasn’t sleeping,” Hidan replies. His body is tense and it needs conscious effort for him to relax, only eased a little by Kakuzu’s presence. He’s been gripping his necklace, Jashin’s symbol printed into his palm as red streaks. “The fuck took you so long?” He tugs at Kakuzu’s cloak and pulls himself up. The world swims in front of his eyes for a bit. Maybe he has been close to falling asleep.

“I ran into Konan,” Kakuzu says, “We exchanged details on our new mission.”

Hidan nods. “The Two-Tails.”

“We’re heading out for Kumo tomorrow.”

Getting rid of the drenched clothes is something that shouldn’t feel as good as it does. The cloaks are heavy with rain water, only barely dried from the short time they’ve been inside. Stepping out of damp pants and soaked sandals is relieving and takes a weight off of Hidan he didn’t realise was so heavy. Dressing in fresh, dry clothes, Hidan skips putting on a shirt and shoves his wet cloak into the nearest hamper over Kakuzu’s.

“I hate it here.”

The quarters somewhere in the lower floors of the tower aren’t much bigger than the room in the infirmary. They are even made smaller by having to hold two beds. One of theirs is taken by their belongings.

Kakuzu throws him a towel for his hair. “You hate everything.”

“Not true.” There’s no much sense in drying his hair anymore than it already dried on its own but at least the towel is warm around his shoulders. “I don’t hate Deidara.”

Having them around is fun. They’re quick to anger but not strong enough to lash out against Hidan the same extent Kakuzu is able to. Hidan would go as far as to say that there’s something like a reluctant friendship between them. Seeing them in the infirmary was strange. Deidara doesn’t belong there, isn’t meant to be held back by anything, not even themself. Sympathy. Maybe sympathy was what Hidan felt then.

“They’re reckless,” Kakuzu says, “They’ll die young.”

Hidan flops down onto the bed unoccupied by their stuff and lets out a huff. “That’d be...” Sad? Good? Something that’d please Jashin? He doesn’t know. Maybe he’d miss them. “Hey, about Sasori… what do you think about it?”

Kakuzu finishes getting dressed, a loose shirt that’s easy on the masks on his back and that he’ll only have to wear temporarily. The mask and hood stay off. “He died. What about him?”

Hidan rolls onto his side to properly face Kakuzu. “I don’t know. I think it’s weird. Deidara said he let himself be killed. I don’t get that.”

Kakuzu settles down next to him, sitting back against the headboard and fishing out his book from his bag. Hidan lays his head on his thigh.

“I don’t understand it at all.”

“You sound like Deidara.”

Hidan doesn’t deny that. “It’s just… how could he choose death?” It doesn’t seem like something people should be doing. People shouldn’t be wishing for death. It’s something unusual.

“You want to die too,” Kakuzu says.

“The difference, though, is that I can’t, even if I chose to.”

Suddenly it clicks. What was on his mind earlier wasn’t the shock of someone like Sasori being defeated, it never has been. It was the realisation that everyone but him had a saying in when they died. That they had control over their own deaths.

He puts a hand on Kakuzu’s and guides him to put down the book so he can look at his face. “You thought about ways to kill me yet?”

“I’ll let you know when I come up with something.”

“Just say you were busy counting money or something. Don’t come up with excuses.”

The crease between Kakuzu’s eyes deepens even more when he looks down at Hidan’s grin. “Are you trying to make me angry?”

Hidan waggles his eye brow. “Is it working? You fuck great when you’re angry.”

Kakuzu shoves him off his leg. “We’re not doing this at the headquarters.”

Hidan shuffles around until he’s comfortable again. “Didn’t take you for so prude.” But a small part of him is grateful for that; he shoves it down in favour of pouting. “I don’t hate you either, you know?”

Instead of an answer one of Kakuzu’s hands finds its way into his hair and strokes through the damp strands. His fingers are rough and the motions aren’t soft. It’s as gentle as Kakuzu can be, though, and Hidan is content with that. Nevertheless Hidan reaches up to stop it from its movements and hold it instead.

***

He’s thirteen and the world should be brighter. It isn’t. There is a sun in the sky but it shines down on him in shades of grey. According to his fellow students it’s supposed to be yellow and a memory in Hidan remembers that too. It’s supposed to be yellow and gold and warm.

At the academy they teach him about chakra and he quickly learns that he can’t control it.

It’s fine, they say, he’ll be exceptional in tai- and bukijutsu instead.

They were right.

He learns to throw shuriken and kunai, learns how to wield knives and swords and how to use fists and paper bombs. He’s good at it, too. Between his seven year old self and the him now lie years of watching other people do these things. He’s seen some soldiers summon high tides and throw fire balls at their opponents.

It takes him months to get adjusted to the proper techniques that exceed what he taught himself. His movements become more controlled but incalculable by his opponents. His teammates are impressed by him as is he by their ninjutsu, something he won’t ever be able to replicate. They’re impressed and still they regard him as their weakest asset.

When their team is sent out to fight the war, they’ll end up knowing better. Above the battlefields the sun becomes red.

***

When they leave Amegakure behind for the Land of Fire it feels easier to breathe. That’s what Hidan says at least. He keeps a faster pace, always walking a few steps in front of Kakuzu. An unusual occurrence. Kakuzu wonders what brought it on but doesn’t ask. Maybe Hidan wants to take in the world as it is before he manages to die. Maybe there is no reason at all.

Kakuzu finds that he wonders about Hidan a lot. About the cheeriness he showcases sometimes that is in contradiction with the words he spoke out loud that night in the Land of Earth and again in that inn in Kusagakure. Hidan is no liar but the coexistence of these so starkly different moods of his is baffling.

Kakuzu’s been alive for a long time now and the thought of death hasn’t come to him in that time. At least not in a way that he spent much time thinking about it. When it comes, he shoves it away again and searches for the next bounty to keep himself fed, the next heart to keep him alive for even longer. He can understand someone’s decision to die, he simply can’t apply the their reasonings to himself. And while Sasori’s reasoning is unknown to him, he’s sure there was one.

They cross small villages on their way through the land, most of them small and only inhabited my farmers. The next bigger one is halfway through the Land of Fire where they rent a hotel room. They fuck that night, headboard rattling against the wall and Hidan’s cries muffled in the pillows and the bites as he digs his teeth into Kakuzu’s shoulder. He’s content afterwards, sleeps soundly at Kakuzu’s side and demands he buy him taiyaki before they leave the village again.

Kakuzu has been alive for a long time now and the thought of death is strange to him. Looking at Hidan wolfing down his meal, still young and barely having lived for one lifetime, he wonders what it is that makes him want to die.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since some rl stuff came up I will have to pause this project for a week until I sorted everything out. I want to use this opportunity to thank everyone who has read this far, left kudos and/or comments. It really means a lot to me and I'm glad so many people are enjoying my fic. <3 Unless something unexpected happens, the next update will be out on Oct 26th. Much love to everyone!


	13. Chapter Thirteen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for the kind comments on the last chapters, they really make my day every time! As promised, I'm back to updating regularly again.
> 
> Enjoy!

Hidan doesn’t need to be told when they cross the border to the Land of Hot Water. He can smell the change from the air alone. It’s been over a year now since he officially left here to join the Akatsuki and his life became a series of missions and bounty hunting all over the world at the side of a quick-to-anger miser.

“Did anything change?” Kakuzu asks on their third day of travelling across the land.

Hidan shakes his head. “Nothing changes much in just a year.”

It’s a lie. Of course, things change within a year. His whole life changed. He’s found someone willing to find a way to kill him once and for all.

They discuss it while walking.

“You can’t starve or die of thirst.”

“Yepp.”

“Stab wounds don’t kill you, nor does blunt force. You survive poison and decapitation.”

“Yepp.”

“What if you stop the rituals?”

Hidan waves that off. “It would anger Lord Jashin.”

“Disintegration?” Kakuzu asks.

He shrugs. “Hasn’t happened yet. I don’t know.” He’s been close, however, the Tsuchikage’s particle style techniques still fresh in his mind. Maybe that would have finally killed him like he hoped it would. Maybe he would have lived on, separated into the smallest part of himself but still alive and aware and in pain. Kakuzu saved him from that fate and for that he is grateful. Not that he would ever tell him.

“This won’t be easy,” Kakuzu says.

“Well duh.”

Kakuzu swats at his head. “Use your head for once and try to come up with something too.”

“Hey, I already tried a lot, okay?”

The road leads them deep into the country then branches off in two directions at the foot of a mountain, its peak covered in snow. Winter has come to Yugakure early this year, the cold air originating in the Land of Snow. These mountains are what keeps most of the winter in the north, gives the south of Yugakure and most of the Land of Fire the mild climate. At the fork road signs point in both directions.

“We’re going around,” Kakuzu says. He’s the one leading the way no matter where they are.

But this is Yugakure’s land.

Hidan holds him back by the sleeve and tugs at it to go in the other direction. “We’re going through the mountains.” They’re giants with snowy tips. Cold wind comes down from them, only whispering from the harsh freezing temperatures that must reign up there. Hidan doesn’t mind it. It won’t kill him, it wouldn’t kill Kakuzu.

“Why?” Kakuzu pulls back from Hidan’s grip.

Hidan shrugs. “It’s faster. Winter doesn’t matter. Not to us.”

“You’re adamant about this.”

“I’m supposed to use my head, right? If this way’s faster, why shouldn’t we take it? This is Yu. S’not like there’s anything dangerous here.” He stops in his tracks when Kakuzu does, arms crossed and expecting something better. Hidan groans. “Okay, okay. There’s something I wanna show you.”

“And what might that be?”

“No, that stays secret until you see it.”

They stare at each other. Kakuzu’s face is unreadable as ever, not least because he’s always wearing that mask. Hidan has learnt that he doesn’t budge when it comes to big matters. He’ll give in when Hidan wants him to buy food to eat on the road or when Hidan needs a new cloak – subtracting it all from Hidan’s share of Akatsuki’s finances but Hidan doesn’t care too much about that anyways. Their travel routes belong to the big matters, the bounties they hunt down and the way they do it. There’s no bounties for them in the Land of Hot Water.

At last Kakuzu sighs. “Fine.”

It’s rare that Hidan leads the way but for a moment he lets himself revel it that.

The mountains have never been Hidan’s favourite part of the Land of Hot Water but then again he dislikes the country as a whole anyway. There are no established roads in these parts, only paths flattened by thousands of years of people deeming it the best way up. The woods end early up the slope and leave nothing but unruly, sharp rocks covered in frost the further they go up.

They don’t make it to the back of the mountain. The wind blows down from there, freezing and unforgiving, but it keeps the planes of snow at a level that it wouldn’t rise above their body height. Instead Hidan only sinks into snow to the knees as they make their way along the mountain side.

“Close your damn cloak,” Kakuzu says, “It’s unnerving.”

The cold doesn’t bother Hidan too much, on the contrary: it makes him feel wonderfully numb where others would already suffer severe freezeburns. For Kakuzu’s sake he still zips it up to his chin. Snow crusts into the fabric.

“You know you’re fucking showing off, right?” he says back.

Kakuzu looks down at him where he’s walking on the snow and for the first time Hidan hates that he isn’t able to learn chakra control. He’s seen Kakuzu walk over water a number of times already, of course he could walk on top of snow too.

“It was your decision to take this route.”

“Asshole. At least carry me or use some jutsu to help us along or _something_.”

Kakuzu continues walking. “I enjoy seeing you suffer the consequences of your actions.”

Hidan stomps through the thick blanket of white to catch up to him. “Yeah, you do. But this isn’t even the good kind of suffering.”

“We can still turn around and not lose too much time.”

“Hell no!”

It’s been a long time since he last visited the mountains of this area but the memory of them is ingrained into him. He would never be able to forget what he has seen here.

***

He is fourteen and tastes the battlefield. Dirt and spit mix in his mouth and the wound on his back is oozing blood. Facedown on the ground he doesn’t know anymore what got him here. With the one eye that isn’t filled with earth he sees the blurry image of his knives a few feet away from him. There’s people fighting, too. They’re only shapes he can’t differentiate. Konoha nin, Kumo nin and those from Yu, all muddled together. They’re all the same people now. They’re all here to just fight. Without reason. The only thing keeping them going is the thirst for blood, the adrenaline, the own desperate, selfish wish to not have their own blood spilled.

Hidan is just like them.

Someone drags him up into a sitting position and then he sees his teammate. The girl above him pushes at him to find the wound that he’s bleeding from. The other two fight whoever dealt it. Maybe they’re winning, maybe they’re dying now.

Hidan doesn’t know.

He doesn’t care.

He’s up again before the girl can find his wound and treat it. It’s already healing up. He can pretend it wasn’t that deep later. That he just hit his head too strongly.

This is war. There was never anything else but bloodshed.

Three years later he will return to this place.

***

“They call it the Valley of Hell.”

After two days they’re deep in the mountains now, the pinnacles far away now to give way to a valley between them. It’s smaller than anything in the Land of Earth but a valley nonetheless. There’s no snow here and soon they also leave the frost behind. There’s water in the ground, running hot and steaming as in many other places of the Land of Hot Water.

Hidan unzips his cloak down to his chest. Even the air is warmer here, the mountains protecting the valley from the harshest winds.

There’s silence. No grass that rustles in the breeze, no birds, no lizards, no insects. It’s an unliving place. Only their footsteps echo from the rock faces. Hidan is glad to have solid ground under his feet again.

Kakuzu clicks his tongue. “Now what did you bring me here for?”

“Told you to wait and see. It’s not far anymore.”

He isn’t lying. The place is close now. The air getting warmer with every step.

Soon they reach the crevice in the valley, a rocky path leading down into the guts of the mountain. Kakuzu gives Hidan a sceptical glance but follows him down anyway. Sloshing noises interrupt the silence and become louder. The gurgle of an underground river running through the mountains accompanies them until it rises to a creschendo.

In the valley is a crater, uneven and harshly cut into the ground like an open wound. The water breaks free from the rocks like blood spraying from a cut to the neck. It’s a bright red shade, running hot down more rocks as it falls into a lake at the bottom of the crater together with many other small rivers like it. A pool of blood red. The taste of metal is in the air and sticks to Hidan’s palate.

“Great, right?” He grins at Kakuzu.

“The Valley of Hell is named after a red lake,” Kakuzu only says, unimpressed and toneless.

“People don’t come here,” Hidan says, “They’re think it’s cursed.”

He watches Kakuzu take a look around as they keep walking, descending down a path leading down to the lake. “Is it?”

Hidan shrugs. “Maybe. People _did_ die here. Lots of them.”

He remembers none of the faces, not consciously. He sees them in his dreams sometimes but doesn’t recall them when he wakes up.

“Did you kill them?” Kakuzu asks.

Hidan notices that his grin is faltering and makes the effort to keep it up and natural. “I was eight.”

“You never know when it comes to you,” Kakuzu replies.

“I didn’t,” Hidan clarifies, “I just found them. I think later people thought I killed them. But I didn’t.”

“You told people about this?”

“Well, yeah. Much later, though. I was a feral child that didn’t talk much, remember? I’d seen a lot of dead people at the time but I didn’t kill anyone. They were just there.”

The memory of coming here is vague. The him that is eight years old somehow fumbled his way here through the mountains, with cold and bloody fingers from climbing, clawing into the thin sleeves of his shirt.

“They were already dead. I don’t know what killed them.”

There are corpses around him, all lying by the side of the lake and on the paths leading down there. The red water laps at some of their bodies, makes them move like they’re still breathing but dead eyes stare back at Hidan. Men, women, children. All of them are empty of life.  
“They had no wounds at all. They were just all dead.”

He stays the night in the valley, lets the water warm him up and wash away the dirt. His body is healed already, his fingers no longer stiff and cramping. He tastes blood in his mouth from the steam. Around him are dead people, watching them and not seeing him at all. It’s another village of blood, like his home. But when he closes his eyes, he can pretend that he’s safe, that they’re sleeping, that they won’t harm him. They don’t. The one night he spends in this valley he sleeps among them.

Kakuzu claps a hand on his shoulder, warm, heavy and rough. “You’re zoning out.”

“Hm?”

“Is the air making you stupid?”

“Sorry, sorry.” He shakes his head to come back to himself. They’re on a path between the rock face and a steep fall down to where the lake is blowing out steam. Above them the crevice is closing into a cave but the next opening is already in view again, showing patches of a sky getting darker and the moon already rising. “We should stay the night.”

Kakuzu glances at him. “Are you sure?”

Hidan tries to shrug it off. “Why not? It’s warm here. Better than another night out in the snow.”

Kakuzu can’t argue with that. They find a spot at the lake’s shores where the ground is flat enough to comfortably lie on and build their camp there. The air is damp, moisture setting into Hidan’s hair and his clothes. But it’s still better than the snow during the previous nights. Warmer.

They eat in silence but Hidan doesn’t manage to get more than a few bites down his throat. The taste of metal makes the dried meat seem foul and saltier than it is supposed to be.

More than anything else, with all the water around him, Hidan becomes aware that he’s dirty with grime and sweat.

“I’m taking a bath.” It’s not even an excuse when it’s true.

Kakuzu shrugs. Hidan watches him finish his meal and settle into their camp, taking out his book to read. He undresses fully and gets into the water. When it’s deep enough he submerges himself completely.

Under the surface the water becomes black with darkness. The moon and stars don’t reach him here. It’s dark and quiet and lonely.

It’s warm too.

This time there are no corpses around him, no one is staring and not staring at him. When he goes up for air again, Kakuzu is still there, still reading, still breathing. Still alive.

Hidan leans back and lets himself drift.

Above the crater and outside the cave the wind whistles through the rocks.

“Hey.”

“What is it?”

“What are you reading?” Hidan asks. “You’re always reading that. I’ve seen you finish it… I don’t know how many times.”

“It’s a good book. You don’t read, so you wouldn’t know.”

“I’ve read books.” It’s not as defensive as he could have said it. He blames the warm water.

“Have you?”

“Not like I could have cheated during my written exams, you know?” With no chakra control there were no ways for him to use any jutsus to his advantage. “I’m serious, what is so special about that fucking book?”

Kakuzu closes the book but keeps his thumb between the pages. The cover is getting more and more brittle by the day, the paper is yellow and from the few peeks Hidan has had at the words they’re almost washed away from age too. “It was a gift from my wife.”

Hidan finds his footing on the lake’s bottom and begins rinsing his hair. “Sentimental.”

“It has a good story, that’s why I kept it.”

“What’s it about?”

“Read it yourself.”

Hidan steps out of the water and rummages his bag for some dry cloth to dry himself off, pointedly flinging some water at Kakuzu who lets it happen but not without looking at him with a disapproving stare that tells Hidan that he’s being childish. “It looks like it’s falling apart.”

“Things do that with age.”

Finally dry, Hidan gets dressed again. “You don’t.” He drags his sleeping bag over to where Kakuzu’s leaned back against a boulder and crawls in, resting his head on Kakuzu’s thigh. “Hey, you think I could just die from old age? I am aging and growing and all that so it should be possible for me to just… grow old and die, right?”

“Only one way to find out.”

“I’d still like to die sooner.” The thought of living a long life is daunting somehow. He’ll outlive everything he knows. “Hey, if that doesn’t happen, you’ll stay alive with me to wait and find out, right?”

“I intend to stay alive for a while longer, yes, and you said yourself that I’m not getting rid of you, so I suppose I will wait and find out with you.”

Hidan turns onto his side to lay an arm around Kakuzu’s waist and bury his face in his stomach. “You’re a real fucking romantic, you know that?”

Kakuzu’s fingers find their way into his still damp hair and rest there. Hidan falls asleep like that.

***

When he’s seventeen there’s peace in Yugakure. It’s a strange thing, an unknown thing, and he is scared of it. He has seen battlefields. He has seen so many dead people. He has killed people and at one point stopped counting how many they were that died by his hands. There’s blood sticking to him like it belongs there and it does. It’s on his skin, it becomes crusty in his hair, almost hiding the silver, it sticks to his clothes. It’s under his fingernails and in every pore of his being.

But suddenly he is asked to shake hands with the people from Konoha, with the people from Kumo. There is a distraught child in him that doesn’t want that. That tells him that the him now isn’t who he is supposed to be. The him now isn’t doing what he is supposed to do.

He kills someone – forgets who it was immediately after and decides that it was doesn’t matter. He kills someone and that’s enough.

Yugakure declares him outlawed. They send people to kill him. None of them succeed.

***

After another two days they make their way down the mountains again. The air is steadily becoming colder and more worthy of a country that calls itself the Land of Snow. While they’re still high up he thinks that he can see over the border, see over the entirety of the next country. Everything is white, with the faintest outlines of woods in the snow, frozen rivers cutting through them.

“Told you we’d be faster,” Hidan says with a grin and a waggle of his brows.

Kakuzu doesn’t say anything which is as close to a compliment as he gets.

At the border they’re attacked. A handful of Yukigakure patrols apparently out to catch any intruders they can get. When Kakuzu and Hidan retaliate, the new order seems to be to kill them.

They’re tough, Hidan gives them that. He isn’t used to fight in knee-deep snow and it makes him slower. He takes kunai to the chest, his own blood hot on his skin, warm against the air. It’s by far not enough to take him down. He takes over two ice style users while Kakuzu and the fire mask creature take over the other three.

Hidan charges at one of his opponents, scythe raised. The other man dodges and he and his partner jump away to get out of reach completely. Hidan turns to go after them but the snow around his feet hardens. Ice climbs up his legs and keep him rooted where he’s standing. He clenches his jaw at the sight of the shinobi finishing their hand seals and starting a new series to blow ice cold breath towards him. The ice crystallises on his skin, grows from his pores and his arm becomes stiff. With his free one he takes over the cable of his scythe and starts a new attack.

The shinobi he’s attacking dodges again but the blade grazes him this time. The other one is still signing and then another wave of harsh cold air hits him just as he pulls his scythe back and licks at the blood.

He’s frozen stiff, watching his skin turn blue at the edges where the ice spreads over his skin.

Then the fire mask breaks from between the trees, heat already glowing in its throat. The Yuki nin dodge it as well, turn into the snow itself and materialise again somewhere else. But the mask wasn’t aiming for them in the first place.

The ball of fire washes over Hidan like the water of a hot spring. It burns like the ice and Hidan loves it when, for the moment, the world is nothing but fire. His limbs regain feeling in them, his body regenerating almost faster than the fire can burn him. The snow underneath his feet melts. The entire clearing around him is left as a circle of scorched earth and snow turned into steaming mist. He’s no longer sinking into snow.

From somewhere he hears one of the shinobi scream, catches sight of him and watches. Burn marks appear on the man’s face, contorted into fear and pain and everything beautiful in agony. His death feels amazing, a full-body shiver overtakes Hidan’s body when pain and pleasure all become the same thing in him. It’s ecstatic and leaves him breathless when it’s over.

The other Yuki nin is startled into motionelessness when she sees her partner die out of nowhere. Hidan uses the oppurtunity and lunges at her. He takes his time with her, drawing and ingesting her blood as early as he manages. She’s fierce, fighting back anyway but keeping away from bladed weapons. Her fists are small and weak against him, fingers thin and made for hand seals. Jashin’s symbol is quickly drawn into the scorched earth. At first he rams the spear through his leg, watches her break down, catching herself at the side of a tree. Through the other leg and she slides down the tree trunk with a loud wail.

The next wounds he places carefully to draw out her death. Rams the spear through his palms, then his wrists, through the side of his stomach. She dies then. From blood loss, from shock, it doesn’t matter. She’s given up fighting but her death still feels exciting and fresh.

Between the trees he finds Kakuzu’s creatures return to him. The fight on his side is also over and leaves no survivors but the two of them.

Hidan collects the bodies of the shinobi, one burnt beyond recognition, the other a bloody ragdoll with wide wet eyes. Kakuzu watches him impatiently.

“What?”

“What are you doing?”

Hidan drops the bodies next to Jashin’s symbol. “I’m preparing for my ritual. Don’t give me that look. I haven’t done it since… since fucking Iwa.” It’s been weeks, even months.

And he’s made a mistake that he hopes Kakuzu didn’t notice. That he’s not saying anything is the only thing that keeps Hidan from panicking as he rams the spear through his heart and grips the pendant of his necklace for prayer.

***

While he waits, Kakuzu searches the dead bodies for money but only finds a few bills and cheap coins. A map of the area shows him the different places where patrols are stationed. One of the shinobi is about Hidan’s height and the least bloody. Kakuzu takes the man’s jacket off for later and returns to Hidan’s side.

With the spear in his body and his eyes closed, he truly looks like a corpse. If it wasn’t for the slight movement of his lips while he mumbles prayers to himself, Kakuzu could have believed just that. He tries to read the words – time has taught him how to do it quite passably – but fails. Whatever Hidan is saying is either a strange language or something else.

Something else.

Something is wrong.

When the man was killed by fire there hadn’t been a symbol yet. Something is wrong.

Hidan comes to about an hour later and the wound in his chest closes when he retracts the spear from it. His skin loses the sickly paleness of death and blood loss the more he heals again and he stretches his shoulders, rolls his neck when he gets up. “I fucking missed this.”

“Mhm.” Kakuzu throws him the jacket. The Land of Snow will only become even colder than the mountains of the Land of Hot Water.

Hidan catches it and looks up at Kakuzu before shrugging and putting it on. “You really sure you don’t wanna convert? Not at all?”

“Very sure,” Kakuzu answers. “Come on. There’s a safe house ahead. We’ll stay the night.”

The safe house is a tree house, painted white on the outside with dark markings to make it blend in with its surroundings. They’re barely inside when Hidan grips Kakuzu by the collar, pulls the mask down and kisses him. It’s sloppy and uncoordinated, biting and not gentle at all. Once he’s shaken off the surprise Kakuzu reciprocates until he tastes Hidan’s blood. He tells himself that it’s the leftover adrenaline from the fight as he lays biting kisses down Hidan’s neck.

Hidan in turn nips at his jaw. “Bet you feel really fucking stupid for giving me a damn winter coat, huh?”

Said coat promptly hits the floor ripped in two, their black cloaks quickly joining. Hidan laughs against Kakuzu’s lips and then they’re kissing again. Fingers make it under his hood and Kakuzu helps Hidan taking it off, so they can bury fingers in each other’s hair. Pulling at it, excerting control over Hidan that way, feels like many things at once. Like control, like carrying out punishment, like giving Hidan exactly what he wants. It feels good because he knows Hidan wants it and can take it.

In the corner of the single room of the hut futons are laid out. They don’t make it there, instead end up on the floor next to them but Kakuzu doubts that Hidan minds the pain of his back scratching over hard wooden floor while he thrusts into him. Judging from his face, the way his fingernails dig into Kakuzu’s back, the way he moves his hips against his, he loves it and Kakuzu wants to drink up every single moan from his mouth.

Then Hidan takes him by the wrist and leads his hand to his throat. Kakuzu presses down. It makes Hidan flinch and tighten around him for a moment but he relaxes again when he gets used to the breathlessness. His moans come out choked and pleading, his eyes begging.

Kakuzu shifts to close both hands around Hidan’s throat as they keep going. Hidan holds onto his wrists then, fingernails on Kakuzu’s pulse points. He doesn’t push him away, pulls him closer instead. His throat works to let in air but can’t. Kakuzu watches Hidan’s eyes roll back. Then only one hand is still gripping Kakuzu’s, the other instead helplessly trying to find a hold on the floor before clawing into the edge of the futon. He comes first, with his teeth gritted, and goes limb, his grip weakening and eyes sliding shut. Kakuzu follows right after.

He cleans the both of them up and carries Hidan onto one of the futon, still almost lifeless and compliant in his hands.

Kakuzu settles down next to him, his book next to him on his pillow.

Hidan startles back to awareness with wheezing gasps, sucking in air like he’s starved for it. His hands fly to his throat and trace fingers over the dark bruises that will stay for a while longer. “Shit,” he breathes, “I needed that so fucking bad.”

“I liked you better when you were quiet,” Kakuzu says dryly.

Hidan half-heartedly swats his leg and throws an arm and a leg around Kakuzu. “You like me. Period.” The scratches on his back close and become unblemished skin again, almost soft under Kakuzu’s knuckles if it weren’t for the muscles underneath.

“Go to sleep, Hidan.”

The Land of Snow is the last obstacle on their way to Kumo and the Two-Tails.


	14. Chapter Fourteen

The jinchuriki leads them underground. It’s a trap, even Hidan can smell that from miles away. Even over the stench of the sewer system they’re passing through. Yugito Nii is exceptionally flexible and fast but if she wants to have this fight in a secluded space, then she could have it. It would be easier to hide their tracks afterwards.

“Don’t kill her, we need her alive,” Kakuzu reminds him again.

Hidan reaches for his pendant and asks Jashin for forgiveness.

Yugito comes to a halt at a point where all sewers come together. The ceiling is high here; a building had to be above them. It wouldn’t be unthinkable. Everything in Kumo is high and connected somehow, not unlike Iwa in that aspect, but even higher up. The closest thing to the sky.

“You won’t get out of here alive,” she threatens.

The letter bombs go off.

The explosions tear Hidan into all directions before the walls cave in and crash down on the three of them. Behind the dust and the rubble he sees the blue aura of the tailed beast manifest. The air flickers from the sudden heat of flames and another shock wave, born from pure power, throws him to the ground where rocks and boulders bury him.

It’s dark for a while. The air is heavy while the dust settles but then Hidan can make out the sky. It’s a flaming orange. He heaves the boulders off and pats the dust from his cloak. Kakuzu’s mask creatures have already spawned. The fire and wind one are merged together and hold off a massive ball of fire spit from the tailed beasts mouth with one of their own. It’s a catlike being, both tails whiping sharply while Yugito stalks across the piles of rubble and along the walls that remained to find an opening in Kakuzu’s defense. He uses pillars of earth to shake her footing but she is faster.

The beast spits another burst of fire when the wind and fire masks are too slow to catch up. The water mask conjures up a tidal wave. The water evaporates the moment it clashes with the flames and covers the area in mist. Hidan uses the distraction to get back to Kakuzu’s side.

“She’s fast,” Kakuzu says. His eyes are follow a spot somewhere behind the dust and Hidan notices the blue flare-up here and there.

“I noticed,” Hidan bites back, “Also keeps her distance. - Hey, can you keep the dust up? Or whatever, just-”

Kakuzu cuts him off with a nod in understanding and sends him going.

Hidan runs off to the side. Shortly after, the earth quakes and dirt and dust is shaken into the air just as the mist subsides. He finds the blue flash of light again when the tailed beast spits fire into the dust cloud to make it disappear. From the left side, he closes in. The dust swirls through the air but his view becomes clearer the more heat radiates of her beast form. In the middle he can make out her human body. A wall of earth rises from her right side, shaking up the ground again. Her beast form is wavering for a while but the two tails stabilise her quickly. The large cat hisses, flames licking between its teeth.

The water mask is next, water spilling from its mouth and soon covering the entire ground. There’s an angry hiss when it hits the flaming blue body of the Two-Tails. It retreats to higher ground. Hidan follows, still keeping to its left side. They leave the cloud of dust now but by the time she notices him, he’s already too close.

The cat opens its mouth and a ball of fire builds up in its throat. Hidan jumps off a pile of rubble and faces it head on.

The burn of fire is a good one. The intensity of it is almost enough to throw him back like the explosions would. But this is just fire. Nothing but fire. Something he can handle. He raises his scythe.

They collide. Being inside the manifested form of a tailed beast suddenly feels thrilling and horrible at the same time. This is the same kind of power that he witnessed in Iwa. It’s overwhelming and otherworldly. It doesn’t belong in this world and yet it’s impossible to think it away. He’s taking down a being with this much pure power in it.

His scythe catches her leg between its blades and gravity pulls them down. They land hard on shards of rock. The tailed beast form collapses into itself and the chakra flows back into Yugito’s body, making her tremble and cough uncontrollably. Her leg is sliced open and oozes blood.

Hidan’s own body still needs to recover from the landing, his ribs bruised and his arm torn open, his whole body covered in burn marks. He’s dizzy for a while.

By the time his body is healed and he’s standing back up, stable on both feet, so is Yugito. Her eyes are wide, the pupils slit like a predator’s, claws of blue chakra have manifested on her hands. The leg wound is cauterised and the familiar smell of burnt flesh hits his nose.

He doesn’t have time to evade her attack when the claws already tear at him like an inescapable whirlwind of the sharpest knives. Blood comes up his throat by the time he manages to be just a bit faster and block her, throw her back with a swish of his scythe. In the next movement he cuts his hand open and lets the blood spill to draw Jashin’s symbol onto the ground. From one of the blades he licks up Yugito’s blood and sends another prayer to Jashin. His skin turns black.

Yugito starts a new series of attack.

A whip of conjured water catches her in the middle of her leap and throws her to the ground as Kakuzu catches up to their fight. She gets up again.

Goes down again with a scream when Hidan stabs himself in the leg. He can’t let her attack him now, she’d kill herself in the worst case scenario.

There’s a hiss again and a fresher wave of the smell of burnt flesh when she cauterises the wound again herself. She screams again. Hidan rams the spear into the same spot again, moves it around for good measure. What feels good to him, is agony for her.

“We got her,” he tells Kakuzu grinningly.

Kakuzu walks up to where Yugito is crumpled on the ground and gives her a shove with his foot to make her roll down the little distance between her and the thin blanket of water in the area. The remnants of the tailed beast’s fiery aura hiss when they make contact with it. Yugito screams in pain, her skin burning like she is being boiled alive. Hidan envies her a little.

“We got her,” Kakuzu confirms.

The screams end when Yugito passes out from the pain.

“Are you going to stay like that until she is dead?” Kakuzu pointedly looks at the white markings imitating ribs on Hidan’s chest.

“It’ll wear off when I do the ritual and ask Jashin for forgiveness for not being able to deliver him a soul this time.”

“That god of yours is complicated.”

Hidan shrugs.

“Make it quick.”

His body returns to normal again. While he is praying he is only vaguely aware of Kakuzu tying up Yugito’s hands and feet even though he’s positive that she wouldn’t wake up anytime soon. She’s broken and bruised and burnt, dirty with dust and bloody from head to toe. When Zetsu comes to pick her up, not a single muscle in her body has even flinched and her breathing is dangerously flat. But she’s alive. That’s what matters. That’s what the leader wants.

“What does he even want?” Hidan asks as they’re leaving Kumo behind. He has never met Pain in person and only knows the holographic, colourless outline of him.

“Become a god. Bring the world peace,” Kakuzu answers, “With the biggest sources of power under his control, he will be feared. The world will be too scared of him to turn on each other.”

Hidan cringes. “I’m not accepting him as my god when he succeeds. If he succeeds.”

“I didn’t expect you to.”

“And the peace part. That doesn’t sound like something you support.”

“I’m in it for the money.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Hidan waves that off. “So you’re gonna stay with the Akatsuki when he gets that far?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?” Hidan crosses his arms behind his head. “Dependent on what?”

“The income.”

Hidan’s posture deflates but Kakuzu keeps walking like nothing is out of the ordinary. Hidan catches up to his side and notices the crinkle around his eyes. “Oh. _Oh_ , you were making a joke. Yeah, no, leave that to me.”

“You are insufferable.”

“And you’re not getting rid of me.”

“I’m going to kill you one day.”

Hidan grins. “You’re really only getting softer with age, huh?”

“I’m definitely going to kill you one day.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love Yugito actually. She didn't deserve this pain.


	15. Chapter Fifteen

In the Land of Fire they kill a monk. Multiple monks but the one Kakuzu is after is only one person. The others are colleteral damage. The fight wasn’t easy, facing off against someone with the same bounty on his head than Hidan but all things considered Chiruku goes down fairly easily.

Kakuzu watches Hidan do his ritual with the monk tied up on what remained of the temple’s walls. It’s religious nonsense but at least Hidan’s religion is useful in that it doesn’t advocate for peace. Whatever Jashin’s followers believe in, it doesn’t exactly hinder what Kakuzu wants to do. It’s one of the things where live and let live makes enough sense.

Hidan looks like a real corpse with only his clothes setting him apart from the strewn around bodies of the monks. Kakuzu thinks that this has to be the closest he will get to death by himself.

Starvation. Decapitation. Other wounds that would be mortal for anyone else. Poisoning. Burning alive. Suffocation.

There are only so many things Kakuzu can try out until it exceeds his capabilities. He still wonders about disintegration. If Hidan would still continue to live and be aware of himself even when torn into the smallest part of him. Part of him thinks that he knows the answer and it isn’t death.

When Hidan comes to again, he looks messy with blood that isn’t his for the most part soaked into his clothes and becoming crusty on his skin, dirt in his face and hair sticking out in all directions before he smoothes it down again.

“You were taking your time.”

Hidan gets up and stretches. “We killed a lot. Besides, I still need to catch up on months of not doing it.”

“Hurry it up next time.”

Hidan walks out of the bounty station when talk about money comes up. Zangei scoffs at it once he’s out of earshot. Kakuzu ignores it and continues counting the money in the suitcase.

“He’s no good,” Zangei says unprompted, “Doesn’t know the worth of money, that one.”

The money is the correct amount and Kakuzu closes the suitcase. “He has his faults,” he just says because it’s true, “But I can’t have anyone else as my partner.”

Zangei sighs. “Whatever. Keep up the good work.”

It comes as no surprise when he finds Hidan in battle with a group of Konoha nin. Even less of a surprise that he got himself into a trap again that Kakuzu needs to get him out of again.

When Hidan tells him not to get involved, Kakuzu decides to let him indulge and have this fight for himself. He’s up against four Konoha nin. One of them is a kid but he’s giving it his all even managing to get a hold of Hidan with whatever his shadow technique is. Their leader wears the same symbol as the monks. He’s putting up a good fight, manages to slice Hidan’s head clean off and for a second they think they have won. The kid allows himself to breathe, almost out of chakra, but he’s the first one to notice that Kakuzu is still a threat to them.

Their leader still doesn’t die when Kakuzu crashes the suitcase over his head but he goes down. They’re in shock, unused to seeing people with abilities like Hidan’s. It gives Kakuzu more than enough time to stitch his head back on. Through the cuts he sees the muscles reconnect and the bone grow back together. Hidan rolls his shoulders.

“It’ll fall off again if you do that,” Kakuzu tells him.

“Shut up, old man.”

The rest of the fight flies by quickly. Hidan kills the leader of the group, laughs while he does it.

When Pain calls them for the extraction of the Two-Tails, they leave behind two distraught shinobi and a traumatized boy.

Retreating deep into the area’s forest they soon stop so Kakuzu can take out the stitches again. Hidan hisses when it gets painful but the puncture wounds already close as soon as the threads are removed.

“We could have gotten them all,” he says.

“Another time,” Kakuzu replies, “The Two-Tails has top priority.” He throws Hidan the headband he’s lost after his decapitation. “Cover up that scar. It’s ugly.”

Hidan eyes the headband but does as he’s told and follows Kakuzu as they continue their way to find a spot to camp in for a few days. “You can just tell me you like me, you know?”

Kakuzu tells him to shut up and doesn’t give another response to that. It makes him consider, though. Why doesn’t he tell him?

For the longest time he tried to tell himself that he doesn’t like Hidan in the slightest. That he is loud, abrasive and annoying beyond anything else, that his religion makes no sense and his devotion is over the top. The truth is that he does like Hidan and that telling him that, with his words, somehow feels more intimate than anything else. It would mean to admit that he has a weakness now. Whether Hidan is actually able to die or not.

Yes, it would mean to admit that he was weak. To himself. And to Hidan.

The place they choose for their meditation is somewhere deep in the woods where old statues rise from the ground, covered in moss. The sky has become grey and the smell of rain becomes heavy. Kakuzu frees the water mask to have it help Hidan and keep up appearances. From what he has observed, it is the most compatible with Hidan.

The extraction takes another three days. It’s straining when he has to put in enough chakra for two and even with multiple hearts and an enlarged source of it, it puts him under stress. The matter becomes even more unpleasant when it really starts raining. The only thing it does is keep his body from running a fever from exhaustion.

After the second day Hidan leans against Kakuzu and back to back they keep each other sitting upright. The rain has yet to stop and with what limited awareness Kakuzu has of the things around him – not confined to the cave Pain has them project into – he notices the tension in Hidan’s body.

The third day the extraction is finally complete. Yugito Nii’s body collapses into a lifeless heap and stays motionless. She is nothing but a corpse now. The monster in the cave opens its second eye. Kakuzu doesn’t know yet what he thinks of it. Pain is adamant about it being a weapon, the ultimate device that shall bring peace to the world. To Kakuzu it is something that will only bring more destruction and unrest. Fear, yes. But people tended to fear something only as long as their desperation hadn’t taken them over yet, spurring them into mindless violence without any regards of the consequences.

Maybe fear would bring peace.

Maybe it would bring more war.

“We’ll be heading back for Konoha then,” Hidan proclaims when the first members take their leave.

Deidara’s new partner leaves but they themself stay behind at the words. “They’re tricky,” they say, “They have the Nine-Tails on their side.”

“All the better. Two birds with one stone.”

“It’s because of that brat that I lost my arm.”

Hidan grins at them. “That’s because you’re pathetic.”

“Says the one who got decapitated,” Kakuzu throws in.

“Hey! You’re supposed to be on my side.”

“We’re leaving. Come on.” He cuts off their connection to the cave and the sound of rain becomes piercingly loud around them. His cloak is drenched and the water has even reached his hair under the hood.

Hidan is equally soaked when he fully slumps against him and buries his face between Kakuzu’s neck and shoulder. “At least they’re fine.”

“They’re fine,” Kakuzu confirms. “You’re saying it as though you’re grateful.”

Hidan shakes his head, then nods. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

Kakuzu has observed the two of them whenever the Akatsuki members gathered together in person. Maybe it was because Deidara about about the same age as Hidan that they got along better than anyone would have expected them to. Maybe it was because Deidara was so hot-headed that it made them a good target for Hidan to annoy without risking too much. Whatever it might be, it could definitely be said that they were something like friends. The idea of Hidan getting close with anyone was a strange one.

“Do you need rest?” Hidan asks. What started off as him leaning against Kakuzu ends up with Kakuzu leaning against him, relying on him to keep him sitting up. The fatigue that came with the extraction of a tailed beast catches up to Kakuzu. The rain doesn’t help. With him completely back in his own body, no longer straining between the two planes of the forest and the cave, he feels every single drop like needles. Four hearts work to keep him warm and his blood runs too hot.

He realises he didn’t answer Hidan.

“I guess you do,” Hidan sighs and rearranges himself around him so soon he has his chest pressed against Kakuzu’s back and their heads rest on each other’s shoulders. Hidan feels for his forehead. “Fucking hell, just tell me you feel like shit.” He wraps his arms around him.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Keeping you warm or something, old man. Making sure your athritis doesn’t get worse.” The tiredness makes Hidan slur his words but he’s earnest in what he says. Three days of concentration only serve to tire every member of Akatsuki out. They don’t manage to sleep here. Not with the rain keeping them cold and uncomfortable, but the pattering of it helps Kakuzu meditate.

***

Hidan is seventeen and he sees his face on wanted posters everywhere. There’s a twisted hedonistic part of him that revels in the knowledge that there are people out for his blood now. There are people who want him dead and gone. There are people who would chase him everywhere just to get a little money out of him. He’s become something less than human to them. He is prey. Just like they are prey. When they find him, he feasts.

He wanders from village to village. Sometimes he decides to lie low. He dyes his hair something dark and nondescript and indulges in comfortable beds and warm bodies next to him. He steals new sets of clothes whenever he deems it necessary. In smaller villages he can allow himself to keep a farm hostage so the rest of the people wouldn’t alarm Yugakure. He sleeps in barns, caves and up in trees. Keeping a low profile is useful a lot of times. But when his mouth becomes to dry, his nerves feel like pins and needles and the restlessness keeps him from sleeping, he kills.

He is reckless when he does it. Brutal. He leaves bodies behind that look barely like human beings, gutted and bloody.

In retrospect he knows that he left a trail. They find him that way. They know him, his techniques, and they capture him, throw him into the back of a cart secured with steel walls. Their destination is Yugakure. They want to execute him there, as a criminal, as an animal. It’s what he is. He knows that. But animals try to live. They fight. They struggle. And so does he, even when it becomes pointless. He is tied up in chains and paralyzed through acupuncture. From all the times that he has escaped before, they have learnt too.

This time he doesn’t escape on his own. He remembers the bang of footsteps on the roof of the cart. He remembers screams ending in wet gurgling as the guards choke on their own blood. He remembers how bright the light was when the cart doors open and let sunlight in, so that he can barely make out the face of his saviours.

They’re believers. Zealots.

They teach him about gods.

***

The rain lets up the same day. When the clouds retreat it becomes apparent that it is still the early morning. Kakuzu doesn’t know how long they have rested and while he feels better than before he certainly isn’t up to full strength again yet. It’s not something to stop him, though. The rest of his reserves have to regenerate on the way.

Hidan has dozed off with his chin hooked over Kakuzu’s shoulder and his arms still holding him. He startles awake when Kakuzu moves. “Feeling better?”

“Much so,” Kakuzu replies. He takes his cloak off just to wring it out before getting dressed again. Hidan just watches him, eyes still halfway closed and shoulders slumped. “Are you okay?”

“Hm? Oh, yeah.” As though to prove it, Hidan jumps to his feet and rolls his shoulders. “Just need to move a bit again to really wake up.”

“Good.”

Hidan grips at his sleeve and pulls him along. “Time to teach these brats a lesson. They’re gonna learn how it feels to get your fucking head chopped off.”

The ones that attack them turn out to be led by the copy ninja himself. The other three are but children, the kid that saw his teacher die through Hidan and his friends. They use the same chakra knives that the dead leader cut Hidan’s head off with. When they fight, they do good work and Kakuzu has to admit that the kid uses his shadow technique cleverly.

Cleverness alone has never won a fight, though.

The kid manages to take control over Hidan’s shadow once more and turns him against Kakuzu. Hidan’s scythe cuts through the air, slashing past Kakuzu but forcing him to dodge and fall back. He finds himself trapped with his back to one of the dead trees in the area. There is nothing alive to destroy here, no risk of endangering innocent bystanders. Good, peace-loving kids like them would choose such a spot to plan an ambush.

Kakuzu hardens his skin against the attack from above. The enlarged, heavier version of one of the kids crashes down into the earth hard enough to leave a crater and spur up dust. With the cloud Hidan’s shadow is free again and he goes to engage the copy ninja and lead him away from the kids for Kakuzu to take care of.

They’re just that.

They’re kids. They’re a village’s future, young and full of optimism. Even with their mentor dead, they keep fighting. Kakuzu knows the determination in their faces. It’s the same kind he used to have when he was their age. They believe in peace, having never been part of a war where Kakuzu has seen three start and end.

He lets the creatures grow from his body. The firemask he sends to watch over Hidan’s fight. The jiongu is flexible, allows him to see what the masks see and yet leaves them the freedom to attack where they seem fit.

The fight goes on. The wind mask’s sharp breath tears the area, slices the ground open and mows down the surrounding trees. Somewhere Kakuzu hears Hidan’s laughter and finds him hurling through the air with the copy ninja still fixed as his target of his scythe’s blades.

It’s a long fight. Kakuzu expected that much from the copy ninja but the kids’ endurance is almost impressive with how much they’re driven by the thirst for revenge and rightiousness. Often his and Hidan’s opponents switch and he goes hand to hand against the copy ninja while Hidan struggles to dodge the shadow kid’s jutsu.

The copy ninja is the most dangerous of them. He’s skilled, even has a sharingan in one eye that Kakuzu wants to pluck out and keep as a trophy when they’re done here. Maybe just for himself to compensate him for the trouble, maybe to spite Itachi when they next meet in person. He would definitely take his heart to finally fill the missing spot of the lightning mask.

Going into the fight there shouldn’t have been a worst case scenario for Hidan and him. It comes true anyways. The shadow kid gains control over Hidan and immobilises him. It is only for a short moment that Kakuzu gets concerned before he wants to focus on his opponent again but it’s too late. Only the blink of an eye he didn’t keep watch on the copy ninja.

A fist charged with lightning pierces his chest. The pain is hot and red, like needles entered his bloodstream. He hears Hidan call his name before he collapses.

He doesn’t die yet. He can’t die yet.

The firemask returns to his torn body and the stitches pull him together again. As soon as he can see straight again Kakuzu conjures up balls of fire, tree high flames that burn the surrounding trees and dry bushes to ashes. Hidan gets hit and his skin burns off while his body visibly fights against it, almost healing him faster than he can get hurt.

A wave of water makes the fire stop and with a hiss of water turning into hot steam the attacks cancel each other out.

Then Hidan is gone. The shadow kid too.

After having taken out one of his hearts, the copy ninja has the nerve to taunt him. “You two are too dangerous together,” he says.

“The kid won’t live,” Kakuzu tells him. Hidan can hold his own. Judging from the everpresent tension in the shadow kid’s face, his chakra will be used up completely soon and his technique would be useless. Even Hidan would notice such things and use them to his advantage when the time came. When he was finished with the boy, Kakuzu would wait for his with three more bodies to exchange for money, a new heart and a sharingan eye.

A field of cut down trees, deserted ground and more dust than air around him; it’s not the place he would die at.

The girl is no danger. The other boy attacks but follows an easy pattern that makes it easy for Kakuzu to detect in time to use his own weight against him and slam him into the ground before he turns his attention back to the copy ninja. The wind mask circles them, blasts sharp winds at the other man when there is an opening.

Fighting starts to be draining. With one heart gone so is part of his already drained chakra reserves. From the beginning he hadn’t been fully recovered from the Two-Tails’ extraction and the fight becomes exhausting, wearing him down slowly but surely.

He doesn’t worry about Hidan.

He tries not to worry about Hidan.

He loses another heart when all three of his opponents attack at once. The boy has build up enough energy to make himself larger and stronger again. From Kakuzu’s other side lightning flashes around the copy ninja’s hand. He finds himself in the middle of it. The girl turns out to be a danger after all. Her voice scratches at his mind and becomes another thing to fight. He’s heard of the Yamanaka family’s technique, knows enough to know that he needs to fight it with will alone. He manages. She doesn’t gain control of him. However, it’s another wasted moment, another wasted blink of an eye that is his downfall. She doesn’t gain control but the short fight against her technique is enough to stun him.

The boy in his enlarged form keeps him from dodging in time and the copy ninja lands his second strike.

Kakuzu goes down again. Two hearts left.

The wind masks tears at his chakra reserves when it tears open a way for itself, forcing the Konoha nin to retreat into safety, before it returns to Kakuzu’s body and builds him back together.

His vision becomes blurry. The water mask in him is the only thing keeping his blood cool enough to focus.

He won’t die here. Not on this day.

He doesn’t worry about Hidan. He doesn’t.

The kids must have drained their energy completely. For the remainder of the fight they stay back while the copy ninja lunges at him again. The both of them are exhausted, saving up the last of their chakra for when it becomes absolutely necessary. Fists fly, sometimes knives. He grazes the copy ninja at the leg with a knife and in turn he is struck by a punch that makes his skull rattle. It becomes fists, nails and brute muscle strength. A fight that Kakuzu wins. He’s fought like this before. Wild and reckless. A younger him fought like this, boldly, filled with idealism and brashness. The idealism became survivalism, the brashness desperation when he fought Hashirama and almost found his death await.

Fighting the copy ninja know feels like being alive. Being dangerously alive, and aware that this same life could be over any second.

He’s quicker to sign a series of hand seals and capture the copy ninja in a patch of burnt and dry earth. The technique is weak and ineffective at stopping the other man but it’s enough to make him lose his momentum. Kakuzu crashes a fist into his jaw and wrestles him down, hand flat on his face, pressing him into the ground. With more pressure he could break his skull in.

They’re breathless, bloody and torn at the seams. The copy ninja is bleeding from cuts all over his limbs where Kakuzu is barely holding himself together, knots of threads covering the wounds on his chest in an attempt to keep him from bleeding out what little blood he has in his body.

Just a little more. He just needs one final strike.

It hits him instead. Out of nowhere pain bursts out in his chest and the knots tear apart. What he doesn’t bleed out is forced up his throat until it runs down the corners of his mouth.

The copy ninja stares up at him with a mixture of relief and triumph.

Kakuzu doubles over as the wind mask on his back breaks and thread fall from his body in lumps only to disintegrate into thin air. “How… how did you?”

He tries not to worry about Hidan but he knows this is because of him. Hidan was tricked.

One heart is all he has left.

The copy ninja wrestles them around, lightning once more whizzing around his hand. He doesn’t need to say anything and does anyway. Something Kakuzu isn’t listening to. About the future, about the hope that these kids carry. Something else. The lightning is blinding.

Kakuzu’s body dies there that day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not really 100% content with how the fight turned out but I am content with having the InoShikaCho-Team plus Kakashi be the ones to actually win the fight, without a Naruto ex Machina. Seeing as in this version they also fought a weakened Kakuzu it felt more fitting. I also don't know how many times I called Shikamaru "kid" in this but I love him lots.  
> Also fear not, there are still seven chapters to come, so this won't be the end!


	16. Chapter Sixteen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter summery: Hidan suffers.

The wound on his chest is still open when the Nara kid traps him in a web of letter bombs. Hidan tastes the blood in his throat and he wants to vomit it all out. He can taste Kakuzu’s blood in it, it makes his stomach churn just thinking about it.

He’s trapped. Underneath is feet is nothing but a dark, cavelike hole in the ground, the strings of the letter bombs the only thing keeping him up. He killed one of Kakuzu’s hearts. He does the best thing he can still do.

“You fucking little bastard! I’ll make you pay for this. Fucking asshole. All of you. All your fucking friends are dead now anyways, I bet. You wanna kill me, too? Fucking try it, I fucking dare you, you little-”

His scythe is down in the hole somewhere, his spear close enough to the edge that it might fall in too at the slightest shiver of the earth. The Nara kid only looks at him coldly, ignoring all the insults Hidan throws at him. He seems to be somewhere else, not even really looking at Hidan but through him. He has a lighter in his hand that he absent-mindedly flicks open and closed again, letting the flame dance.

Deer come from the forest around them, watching him through their big, empty eyes. They move too quietly to be real.

“Hey, are you fucking listening? You hear me? All your friends are probably dead now. How’s that feel?”

The Nara kid throws the lighter and the bombs go off.

Hidan doesn’t even get the chance to breathe. Smoke, air pressure and blood fill his mouth and throat all at once. His muscles are torn apart, his joints separated. From the corner of his eye he sees his arm fly and for a moment he’s barely conscious enough to think that _this isn’t right_. Something primal builds in his stomach and then he’s separated from that feeling too. The pain remains. Hot blood spraying up his body and covering all of him. He doesn’t feel that either anymore.

The back of his head hits hard rock and the crash gives him another wound to bleed from. He is lying in a pool of his own blood, he soon realises, staring up at a round patch of sky above him. What stares down at him is the kid and dead-eyed deer.

The forest is quiet around them, soundless, not even the bristling of wind.

When the next explosion comes, the bang tears the air, seems to cut the sky apart. Mud and rock flood the hole in the ground, burying his dismembered limbs. A rock smashes half his face in. “I’m gonna get out, fucker!” he screams at the kid, ignoring how his own blood wants to choke him, “I’ll claw my way out of here and bite your throat out!”

It’s like a landslide is coming down on him. Sediment forces its way into his mouth through his throat and nostrils until he bites down on pebbles. He smells the earth, tastes it. Hates it.

He doesn’t know when it all stops. The kid is probably long gone. Good for him. What Hidan regrets even more than letting himself be fooled like this is that he won’t get to see the kid’s face when he realises that his friends are really dead. He wants to hear the mourning wails. Wants to see the kid cry before Hidan finally gets to kill him himself.

Because Kakuzu would come to get him. He would find Hidan and get him out of this hole, sew him back together. He would come and Hidan would be okay.

He would be okay.

His body isn’t attached to his torso, maybe his heart would have raced otherwise, restless, panicking. He’s not attached to lungs that could have him end up hyperventilating. His mouth is filled with earth that muffles him but it’s his own blood that he tastes most prominently.

Kakuzu would come.

It was only a matter of time.

After a while he starts praying.

His god doesn’t answer him. The silence becomes deafening, creeps inside his head and screams there. It’s so quiet and so ear-piercingly loud all the same. He tries to listen for the sounds of the woods. They’re familiar to him, he can try to imagine them. Above him there should be deer trotting around, birds chirping in the trees, foxes in the bushes, leaves in the breeze.

He tries.

The forest in his mind is Yugakure’s. It’s wild and untamed, with trees grown tightly together and the leaves block out the sun. It smells like water and darkness and rotten roots.

***

He’s eighteen when his saviours finish their teachings. Hidan knows about gods now, the benevolent ones and the cruel ones, and he understands the balance the world keeps up. When they send him out into the mountains he goes willingly, eager to learn more, fascinated by this new world view he is presented with. It is one that he can understand, free of peacemakers, filled with warmongering. He meets other people of the same belief in the mountains.

He has been here before but the memory is vague and in it his hands are small and pale. He has grown since then. The red water doesn’t scare him anymore.

They teach him how to pray, how to worship gods. They don’t need temples, they say, their religion has no need for one. When they tell him to undergo the ritual and cleanse himself from his previous life, he’s willing to do it.

Up in the mountains of Yugakure they bury him into the ground.

***

He prays again and gets no answer. In his thoughts he calls out for Kakuzu in a desperate attempt to connect to him. It’s dumb, it’s stupid and it doesn’t work but that rational part of him is drowned out by screaming silence.

He calls out and gets no answer.

“Come and help me out here, bastard!”

Nothing.

“I’ll pay you!”

Nothing.

“I’m sorry about killing that heart of yours. I’ll find another strong one for you.”

Nothing.

Hidan prays and gets no answer. The silence becomes louder. Slowly, the pain catches up to him, like his body realises that it should be writhing in agony. The weight of the earth around him keeps him from moving. The earth in his eyes burns, makes him tear up. He becomes aware of everything at once where before there was just wonderful numbness born from shock.

He doesn’t know how much time has passed. Hours. Maybe days. Maybe weeks already.

Kakuzu still doesn’t come.

Worms and bugs find his head, make their way into him through his wounds. Maggots bite away at his smashed eye and the tissue around his neck. He tastes chitin in his throat and hopes that what they eat of his body will poison them. Will poison the earth around him and then the bushes, then the trees, so that everything in this damn forest will just die. So that the deer that stared down at him so dead-eyed and mockingly will drop dead and the Nara kid’s legacy will have nothing to keep holy anymore.

***

He is locked inside a hole in the ground, the size of a small well. Above him the ceiling is just another heavy trap door, a stone plate that needs four people to move it even an inch. Every two days it opens, only a small slit, the bredth of a finger, to slip him food and water. Hidan doesn’t need it but eats it anyways. It’s the most human contact he has, the knowledge that someone gave it to him. While he is here he is not allowed to talk to anyone, to see anyone.

With isolation, they say, you form the ability to perceive the gods on earth that are otherwise hidden in the shadows, in the darkness. We’re blinded by the light, we learn to regard the darkness as threatening, but it doesn’t have to be. In the darkness there’s comfort.

In the darkness is true salvation, a place where nothing has to hurt.

***

Everything hurts. Hidan wants to scream and can’t. He’s sure that his eye is all eaten up because it’s the only part that doesn’t hurt. It feels like the socket in his skull is empty with earth filling it now and worms laying eggs in it. He breathes bugs, tastes nothing anymore. His throat throbs with pain. His smashes skull aches as it tries to rebuild itself against the pressure of earth and rocks burying him here, keeping him motionless.

He can’t heal down here.

He can’t die either.

It’s dark, it’s quiet, it’s cold. There is no salvation here. Not for him.

Weeks, it must have been weeks now. Kakuzu still hasn’t come.

Maybe he died.

No, Kakuzu couldn’t have died. Not against a bunch of brats. He was alive.

He was definitely alive.

Hidan tries not to think of the implications of that.

***

While he is in the cave he thinks he understands what they mean. The comfort of absolute darkness is a soft and gentle one. It doesn’t want him to do anything, he can be who he is without worrying.

After a while he stops eating what the mountain people give him and watches it rot in a corner, eyes slowly used to the darkness.

He’s sure they notice when they collect the dirty plates filled with mold.

It’s not the only thing they notice. His hair grows out, silver replacing the brown dye, and he’s become pale.

After a month they get him out and are in awe of him.

***

It’s hard not to think when his thoughts are the only thing he has. He’s even surprised by himself that he can still make sense of them. Through a haze of panic he can’t feel with all of his body and the rational part of him mulling over anything that could have happened above him, above the ground, he dares to think about the only thing that makes sense.

Kakuzu is alive. He has to be.

Hidan has tried thinking about Kakuzu’s death and it’s stranger than anything he had to think about before. It doesn’t seem like a possibility, suddenly, even though Kakuzu is mortal, dependent on stolen hearts. Still, Hidan can’t imagine his death. Kakuzu is stronger than Hidan, he is cleverer, he could survive anything. He was a man of his word and he promised to would find a way to kill Hidan.

But he hasn’t come yet.

The next thought comes from the ugliest part of Hidan’s conscious, a hideous thing he doesn’t want to think and put into words. He wants the maggots to crawl into his ears and eat it up. They don’t, though, and he thinks it anyway.

Kakuzu is still alive. Kakuzu has abandoned him.

Time becomes nothing but a word that exists.

Minutes, hours, weeks, months, it all loses its meaning to him.

Hidan wants to die.

He prays again to every god he has ever heard the name of and he begs them for death. They don’t answer. Every time he slips out of consciousness, every time he becomes too exhausted from it all, he thinks that this is it, this is finally it. But whenever he wakes up again, he hates the gods a little more.

He is stuck inside an emptiness, somewhere between living and dying as his body tries to repair itself but is eaten away at the same time.

He forgets the gods’ names and still prays.

_Why doesn’t Kakuzu come?_

Nothing.

The world hates him, has never felt anything else toward him. It doesn’t want him, rejects him completely. _Why won’t you let me die?_

Nothing.

He was cruel, he shed blood, he took lives. People would call him evil, malicious and a menace. They would call him an animal, a wild predator with only a thrist for blood. But people died, animals died, even monsters were slain. _What did I do_ _to deserve this? Why me?_

Nothing.

No one answers him.

He is alone.

He wants to die.

He doesn’t.


	17. Chapter Seventeen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter summery: Kakuzu is going through it until he isn't.

The pain is fresh no matter how many times Kakuzu reforms the heart of water to mend its wounds. His escape was a treacherous endeavour. The mask of the last creature broke but the beast itself survived. It turned into liquid and soaked itself into the ground below his body to escape the fist of lightning that would take the last life from his body.

The heart still carries blemishes. It dissolves and rebuilds itself, slowly starting a new rhythm, a new pulse, a new beat that it can work to maintain and keep steady.

He needs a body, something to attach himself to. The heart of water is nothing but a parasite in this form but with Kakuzu’s mind inhabiting it it is capable of thinking further than just an animal. From afar he watches as the Konoha nin transport his body away from the site he was defeated at. He hears them talk about how he might be of interest for medical nin.

His body is a pathetic sight, even to himself. He is torn apart, threads spilling from between the stitches, tearing his mouth wide apart into a horrid grimace. His own eyes stare up at the sky, blind with death. He’s beyond repair.

They think he’s dead. That’s good, it’s good. They won’t look for him anymore after this.

He sticks to the forests around Konoha while he watches shinobi leave and return from missions. At first he clings to foxes and later boars to keep himself alive. He feeds off the animals’ energy and hates the stale taste of it.

He doesn’t keep track of time but he guesses that a little over a week must have passed until the heart of water feels strong enough to take over another human. The opportunity arises in the form of a young man wandering the forest, searching for flowers. He doesn’t learn what hits him when water fills his mouth and throat.

The procedure is strange to Kakuzu, the act of taking over another body a new thing entirely. The man’s personality crashes down on him. His name is Takara, he went to collect flowers for the woman he loves. Kakuzu pushes all of it down to keep himself on top of it. His will is stronger than the one of a weak, hopeless romantic. The body collapses onto the clearing, straining against its own reconstruction to accommodate a second heart. The jiongu changes it, rebuilds it and forms new threads to keep it together where it threatens to tear apart.

The sun sets when it’s over and Kakuzu tries moving. It’s a body unlike his own, weaker, paler, with hands that haven’t hardened from hard work yet. When he walks his steps are shorter than he is used to. In a small pond left behind by rain, he looks at his own face. The jiongu hasn’t reached his eyes yet. It will come with time again. He gives it a few months.

Until then he returns to Konohagakure and finds the place Takara lives in, a small two room apartment of which there are many in every village. The bed in the corner is messy but inviting all the same.

No matter how hard he tries, he doesn’t manage to fall asleep.

Hidan is still in the back of his mind. He needs to find out what happened with him. From what he observed, the Konoha shinobi hadn’t brought his body into the village. He still has to be out there.

He lives as Takara for a while. On the streets and the market square he tries to find out who the group was that attacked them. Finding out about the copy ninja is less difficult, the information that he is out on missions easily accessible. He even learns about the jinchuriki of the Nine-Tails, enough to get a picture of him.

He doesn’t find out what happened to his body.

He doesn’t find out what happened to Hidan.

As Takara he becomes reclusive and he thinks the man’s friends notice it too. He quits the man’s job and finds himself a new one as an accountant of a small business to be able to pay rent for the apartment.

One day he visits the village’s cemetery. The hokages from the stone faces look down on their own graves here. He has heard about all their deaths in his lifetime.

Hashirama’s grave is the grandest of them all, his face carved into the gravestone and smiling down at anyone who passes by. He has the demeanour of a kind man, in life and death, but Kakuzu remembers unyielding eyes looking down at him while he bleeds out, not willing to let Kakuzu do as he pleases but too kind to end his life. Too weak to follow through with what he should have done. Keeping Kakuzu alive was an act of mercy in his eyes, one that Kakuzu hates him for.

“It’s all your fault,” he tells the grave even though he himself isn’t sure what “all” entails. But the dead are the easiest to blame, they can’t talk back anymore.

He finds Tobirama’s grave and doesn’t pay it much attention. The third and fourth hokage he ignores, skimming over their names.

When afternoon settles into evening, he turns to leave, passing by graves next to graves next to graves. People still come, few of them, and they bring incense to their loved ones. Kakuzu passes a woman with striking red eyes, dressed in black. She stops at a grave close to him. A photograph is still positioned on it, someone who must have died recently.

Kakuzu recognises the face as the man Hidan killed weeks ago. Before everything went downhill for them.

So the man had a family. The woman doesn’t wear a ring but it is clear that they were in love, the way she tries not to cry while staring at his photograph.

Kakuzu leaves.

As an accountant he hears from traders, learns about the situation outside the village. After another few weeks he learns of the death of a sannin. The hokage’s unrest is in the air, Kakuzu can feel it in the crowds, in the words spoken by the citizens.

Pain strikes the village when nobody sees it coming.

He brings death and despair, unleashes monstrous familiars in the streets that slaughter everyone they come across. Six bodies operate at the same time and kill men, women and children alike with empty rinnegan eyes. Kakuzu flees with the crowds and they come across one of the bodies commanding a giant, fire spitting lizard dripping flames from its tongue.

The people around him die as piles of burning flesh. The stench penetrates his nose and makes Takara’s body light-headed. The heart of water protects him from the worst but still flames lick on his right arm and leg. It will leave scars but he is alive.

“It’s me,” he tells this Pain.

When the body watches him closer, it seems to recognise him too. “Kakuzu,” it says tonelessly. Then “leave”.

Their exchange ends there and he doesn’t encounter another one. The village’s shinobi fight back against them. Kakuzu watches the familiars vanish as they’re defeated one by one.

Kakuzu leaves the village alive, only driven by the wish to live and the adrenaline that numbs the pain in his burned limbs. This body wasn’t meant to last for much longer. The heart of water keeps the wounds cooled and the pain at bay. He finds his way up the hills around Konoha and watches the destruction. Buildings are burning, whole districts are shattered through earth style techniques. In other places lightning rains down onto rooftops.

Shinra Tensei leaves nothing but a crater.

It isn’t the first time Kakuzu was faced with such destruction. He has seen bigger battles being fought. He was a contemporary to the creation of the Valley of the End, a scar in the earth itself. Yet, in all these fights, never have this many people died at once. The crater is filled with death itself, hills of bodies lining its edges. In the middle is Pain with the sun in his back and as godlike as a man can be.

Kakuzu flees Konohagakure.

For days he doesn’t know where he wants to go. Some part of his conscious tells him to go back and search for Hidan. Another part, a more rational one, says that it is of no use. Searching the area without any clues would not help him. In the worst case, he would die too.

“Leave,” Pain said, so Kakuzu leaves.

With what little money he has on his person he buys food in the next village and sleeps outside somewhere. He goes west, follows the sunset.

Hidan is on his mind with every step he takes. It’s like walking on needles and they dig deeper the farther he goes. The promise he’s made lies low in his stomach and wants him to turn around.

Somehow he ends up in Amegakure and he finds Pain’s tower. Zetsu recognises him by his chakra and lets him in. It feels strange being here while not being himself. Like he doesn’t belong here.

Maybe he has never belonged here in the first place. The bed he gets to occupy feels harder and colder since the last time he’s been here. It’s the same room as last time, he realises, and Hidan is what is missing. It’s too quiet without him.

The only thing that makes him sleep is pure exhaustion.

Konan returns. Her face is wet from rain and tears and her eyes are bloodshot. She carries two coffins of paper with her. For days she locks herself into one of the higher floors of the tower with them and doesn’t leave.

On the fifth day she comes out. Her face is pale, her cheeks have fallen in and she has dark bags under her eyes. She looks like she has cried enough to last for lifetimes, and yet there is also determination.

“Pain is- Nagato is dead,” she says.

“Will you take revenge?”

She shakes her head but still makes her way to the weaponry of the tower. Kakuzu follows her. “He chose it himself,” she says, “There is no revenge I could take.”

“Will you lead the Akatsuki from now on?” It seemed like the logical next step.

Konan stops in the middle of the hallway, her shoulders shaking and her voice trembling. “What is there left to lead?” She turns around. As Takara he’s smaller and suddenly has to look up to her. To him Konan has always seemed as collected and calm and he could respect her despite her young age. This Konan is one broken by mourning. “Sasori is dead. Deidara is dead. Kisame and Itachi are dead. Everyone of us who’s still alive is either a traitor or barely escaped with their life. Kakuzu, tell me, what is there left to lead?”

He doesn’t have an answer to that.

Konan sighs like she expected exactly that. “People will come for his rinnegan. My mission from now on is to protect him with everything I have. I won’t let him be desecrated.”  
They continue their way into the weaponry and Kakuzu watches her collect all the letter bombs she can find.

“Will you stand with me?” she asks eventually but there is no hope in it. Like she already knows the answer.

She is correct. “I’m leaving the Akatsuki. It won’t do me any good to stay any longer. I only came here to tell you that.”

She nods to herself. “I understand. What will you do from now on?”

He shrugs.

“Is Hidan still alive?”

“We talked about this,” he says, “There is no way of knowing.”

It’s the first time he sees her smile then. It’s soft and barely there, mostly around her eyes more than her lips. “You should look for him,” she says, “It seems like you’ve taken to him. You never were curious about your partners before.”

“Maybe I will,” he says, “Once I’ve found a stronger body.”

“This one doesn’t suit you,” she agrees.

It helps him smile a little too and it’s something Takara’s body seems to be used to. “You are bent on fighting.” He almost admires her.

“I am,” she says, “If it’s the last thing I do, I will at least die protecting the people I love. We will be reunited, then.”

It’s a habit from a time where he was tall and strong but he pats her shoulder. “Then this is farewell.”

Her fingers are cold when she reaches for his hand to squeeze it. It seems to give her comfort so he lets her. “This is farewell.”

They part ways. Kakuzu leaves Amegakure behind and promises himself that he won’t return here in the near future, not while Akatsuki is still tied to this place.

Later he will read about what happened, about the lake at Amegakure parting and thousands upon thousand explosions going off.

While he wanders, Kakuzu is only left to think.

He can’t say he particularly liked any of the Akatsuki members but two. All of them were out for their own benefits and Kakuzu was no different. They followed their own ideals, their own imaginations of what way of leading their life would fulfil them. So many of them ended up dead, even choosing it over staying alive any longer. For a second, Kakuzu wishes he knew what made them choose it.

Instead he finds himself wondering why he wonders about it at all. He has never been one of the curious kind. For the majority of his life, he was only out for himself. The thought of death continues to be a strange one, something he doesn’t understand. What made a person want to choose death over living longer? Konan hoped for reunion. Were the reasons different for the dead Akatsuki? Were they the same?

He always comes back to thinking about Hidan.

Just what made Hidan want to die?  
  


Kakuzu finds work in another small village in the Land of Hot Water. Nobody knows him here, nobody knows Takara. He only has vague memories of the place, just another stop while he travelled the land with Hidan. It’s a sleepy village of a few hundred people, so small that the children go to school in another village. The fields that surround it are colourful, with flowers as the village’s main export. He works on the fields. After weeks of travel Takara’s body has build up some muscle and dexterity. His hands have hardened with hard work.

When he doesn’t think about Hidan, he thinks about Kimiko. This is the life he could have had with her. A peaceful life where he goes to work for the day and returns to her in time for dinner. They could have lived a domestic life like most people do. They could have raised a child together. He could have had grandchildren, and he would have died fulfilled and content.

It keeps him up at night.

Hidan was the opposite. Hidan wasn’t made to live peacefully. He was formed by bloodshed around him, raised on war and carved out of scars. Someone who loved the air of battle and the noise of death. Someone tormented for never having experienced the harmless quiet of spring weather without tasting copper at the same time.

Kakuzu works to numb himself, earns enough money to keep him afloat in this strange, new life.

When the war comes, they recruit him as cannon fodder as they do with every able-bodied man and he is sent to Kumogakure. The training they undergo is short and to the point, but not enough to prepare anyone for the reality of war. Kakuzu has seen it often enough. The kages hold colourful speeches to motivate them, not make them less afraid. They talk about the support of jinchuriki.

They talk about Madara Uchiha who is their enemy now.

Kakuzu thinks about the Valley of the End and tries not to think about it too much.

The coast of the Land of Lightning becomes a battlefield soon. What he gathered from what people were saying, Madara raised an army of the undead. Some of them already attacked other hidden villages. He has heard of Sasori and Deidara’s attacks on Iwagakure, heard of past tsuchikages returning to fight their descendants. He’s heard of something that sounds like Itachi’s susanoo. Madara supposedly appeared in the deserts of Suna.

Everything is chaos. Everything is war now.

Kakuzu knows war. He knows fighting to the death and he used to be good at it.

When the army of white Zetsus rises from the ocean shores, none of the younger shinobi are really prepared. Takara isn’t either, his body to weak to even comprehend the power that actual, trained shinobi hold even if his body is holding out for longer than Kakuzu had thought in the beginning. It has become more susceptible to what Kakuzu demands of it, more flexible in the ways he can move now. When the white Zetsus charge, he manages to hold his own against them.

They don’t bleed but they go down.

At one point in the battle he finds the headbands of Konoha nin. He thinks he recognises their faces. The two boys and the girl from the dead forest outside of Konoha. They fight an enemy Kakuzu can’t make out through clouds of dust, steam from the ocean, and balls of fire mowing down Zetsus. The notices the shadow kid, struggling to keep up his technique. So he had defeated Hidan.

Then the first shadow passes over Kakuzu. He would have missed it if it hadn’t been something so familiar. Then another, and a third black creature made up of writhing black threads. One has two faces, wind and fire merged together again.

Kakuzu fights his way through white Zetsus to get closer. Other cadets shout at him to stay back from there and he ignores them.

He sees his own body there, fighting against the shadow kid and his friends. Nothing about him changed. The stitches are the same, used to immobilise some of his opponents. The mask creatures circle around him, taking care of everyone who dares to come too close to the fight. They rain fire and lightning down on the battlefield. Pillars of rock shoot from the ground where people stand. Water prisons capture those who don’t evade them fast enough. This Kakuzu fights with the same ferocity he has fought with for decades, nothing like the weak version that almost died among dead trees, separated from his partner.

Kakuzu knows about the Edo Tensei, developed by the second hokage. It is a tricky thing but there are ways around the mind-control inflicted by the one who used the jutsu. He knows himself enough to know that he wouldn’t have participated in this war otherwise. This is bigger than anything that came before it.

The heart of water separates itself from Takara and becomes a parasite once more, keeping the body moving and charging past the Konoha team directly at Kakuzu.

He kills Takara with a fist to the heart but the water heart lunges and clings to the arm, creeping up to where the scars on his arms open and threads welcome it back to where it belongs.

He becomes one with himself again, this body a familiar one and fueled with the power of five hearts once more. There’s a novelty in not feeling his chakra being drained but he won’t complain.

The memories of his body come back to him, trickling through the mind control, etching it away slowly but surely. He learns the face of the man who resurrected him and the others. Nagato, Itachi, Deidara and Sasori. Part of him starts wondering how he managed to be both dead and alive for so many months but the thought is pushed down by something else.

Hidan isn’t among them. Despite the shadow kid managing to survive, he also hadn’t been able to kill him after all.

Kakuzu disengages from the fight at the ocean shore. For him, it’s a tactical retreat and maybe cowardice took a part in deciding it but there was no use in staying a participant in a war that doesn’t benefit him in any way. If Madara wants complete control over the world, where would that leave him?

The war goes on everywhere he goes, however, with battalions of shinobi heading for the core areas of various battlefields all over the Land of Lightning.

The world is at war, blood soaking the earth.

It goes on for days like this. Many times Kakuzu is attacked by Kumo and Konoha nin. Sometimes they manage to kill one of his hearts and even though the Edo Tensei will keep him from dying habit demands that Kakuzu harvest the hearts of his opponents to keep himself balanced. He fights with the mask creatures by his side and never lets them stray too far away where he can’t see them. The closeness gives him security.

Then something happens and he doesn’t know what but something pulls at him. Wants to rip him away from his body. The tips of his fingers disintegrate into barely visible particles but float in the air around him.

His hearts strain against it, threads pulling hard to keep him together and whole. After he just found his body again he doesn’t want anything to take it away from him again. With all the strength he has, he resists. The particles around him return to his body and rebuild themselves where they were missing. His hands becomes whole again and it feels less like suffocating again.

When the initial shock and following panic subside, he comes to the only conclusion that makes sense. Someone undid the Edo Tensei and it’s only because of his own heart – the fact that he never really died to begin with – that he is still here, still walking when all the other resurrected shinobi certainly vanished again, returning to the afterlife that they were taken from.

It is the same thing all over again. If they think he is truly dead now, they won’t look for him anymore.

The infinite tsukuyomi turns the moon into an eye as bright as the sun itself. When Kakuzu passes through villages he finds them devoid of people. Even battlefields become empty and only at one place does he find people hiding in caves to not look at the moon. When they see him, a man deems it safe to leave again but once he gazes at the moon his mouth drops and his eyes go wide with the design of the rinnegan. He stares into nothing like he is in trance before tree bark grows from the ground and wraps him into it only to swallow him whole.

Kakuzu keeps walking. Whatever happens on the main battlefield now, with the Nine-Tails jinchuriki, Madara and the Zetsus, is not about him and never has been.

The moon only makes the passage easier and stops the ambushes on him. Kakuzu has never believed in any god but one of them seems to have come to like him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not how Edo Tensei works but heyyyy, creative liberties.  
> Also no update tomorrow because of Halloween. I hope you'll all have a good one despite the global situation. <3


	18. Chapter Eighteen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 18: in which we talk about Hidan. A lot.

The war ends quicker than any other war Kakuzu has seen. They tend to go on for years with its opposing sides coming to begrudging agreements to avoid even more loss of human life. But this one ends with people returning from the infinite tsukuyomi as though it had never happened. Kakuzu watches the inhabitants of whole villages reappear in the fields around their houses. They look around in confusion for a while, wondering how they got here, and then group together to exchange. From what Kakuzu gathers, none of them know anything.

He keeps wandering for a while longer until he crosses the border to the Land of Hot Water. This time he chooses a route around the mountain range. It will take longer to find civilisation again but it’s good that way. Curious enough, he finds that he doesn’t feel hungry anymore despite how long he’s been travelling already. The pain in his stomach never comes and stays away even when he eats berries or roasts wild geese just to taste something else than the ashy dryness that came with the Edo Tensei. After a while it becomes a habit, only to feel human.

In the next village he comes across confusion around the strange moon is still present but it’s mostly peaceful. He steals a cheap cloak and a scarf to wrap around his face and keep the scars hidden.

In other, bigger villages he finds a bounty station and after some harsh convincing the owner gives him a bingo book. It’s been updated since the end of the war. War always brings war criminals with it. With many of them leaving the battlefield in the Land of Lightning the Land of Hot Water has become a passage for them. Finding them is easy, fighting them a welcome change to wandering the woods and the money he makes with them is a blessing. It feels like getting back to normalcy. He can afford better, more practical clothes, nights in hotels when he’s sick of the road, and food when he wants to taste something other than ashes.

Something is still missing.

He finds out what it is when he flips through the pages of the bingo in the comfort of a dingy hotel room. The grin on seventeen-year-old Hidan is the same he still wore around Kakuzu, one like he’s convinced that nothing could bring him down.

The world is very quiet without him. Aside from the people at the bounty stations and the inns he stays at Kakuzu doesn’t talk to anyone and even those conversations are short and to the point. They are only doing their jobs and he doesn’t want to talk more than necessary with them. They’re uninteresting to him, not worth his while.

While studying the faces of other potential targets, he notices another thing that is missing.

Kimiko’s book had probably been recovered from his body back then, locked into a box with the few other belongings he had and stowed away. Until Pain destroyed Konohagakure everything might have still been intact.

Hidan is still alive. If the shadow kid survived and his face is still in the bingo book, he has to be out there somewhere.

Yugakure is a quiet, idyllic village in a valley dug in between two cliffs by a broad river with pretty blue water. Waterfalls come down the cliffs but gentle, pooling in natural basins that are heated up by warmth from underground. There are fences around these areas, only accessible through bath houses. Yugakure’s hot springs aren’t something to be enjoyed without payment.

Houses are built into the cliffs, many keep gardens of climbing plants. It’s picturesque, almost a tourist attraction of their own. Weeks after the end of the war this place is busy with tourists again already, building up their infrastructure once more. Even the academy’s entrance gate writes its letters in arrangements of plants.

It’s entirely too pretty, too scenic, too peaceful for Kakuzu to imagine that Hidan spent the majority of his life in this place.

His newly built reputation as one of the land’s best bounty hunters gains him entrance when he asks for someone to talk to about Hidan.

The jonin that walks him to one of the higher ups’ offices doesn’t shut up. He’s another kid, barely even twenty. “Most of our village’s shinobi died out there, my dad too,” he says, “So education was rushed a lot. My little sister had to start going to the academy too, she turns seven next month but thankfully it’s over again. Here we are, sir.”

A small name plate next to the door calls the person inside Izumi. She’s younger than Kakuzu but still an old woman, wrinkles marking her whole face and her posture is slumped where she sits on her desk. Her grey hair is tied into a neat knot with the help of a pencil. She stirs her tea when he comes in.

“Take a seat,” she offers. Her hand is shaky when she sips her tea and drops fall onto the paper work. Her handwriting is still neat, however.

The office is a rundown room as any other in the building, Kakuzu guesses. It smells of old wood and parchment and dust. Shelves line the walls, filled with scrolls and books with dry leather bindings. One shelf consists of only photographs. He takes the offered seat on the opposite side of the woman’s desk.

“I heard you want to know about our Hidan.”

“That’s correct.”

“Is there a reason for that?”

“I like to know who it is that I’m hunting down. It makes my job easier.” It’s a complete lie. He couldn’t care less about the people he kills. The money they bring him is more interesting. Hidan is an exception, the only person he doesn’t want money for. Apart from that, there are things in what Hidan told him about himself that don’t add up yet and he wants to close those gaps.

Izumi nods in understanding and sets her tea cup down. “Well, I like to know who I am talking to. Would you be so kind?”

Kakuzu hesitates but pulls the scarf down that covers his face.

“The war doesn’t leave anyone unharmed,” Izumi sighs and sympathy flies over her face at the sight of his scars. Still he makes sure that his sleeves cover his tattoos. “You are not from the Land of Hot Water,” she says, “What brings you here of all places?”

“It’s profitable,” he answers.

Izumi resigns back in her seat and takes her tea cup in her hands again, this time to just warm her hands on it. “I suppose. War is ugly and with it come vermin, without meaning to offend you.”

“Could we move on?” Kakuzu opens Hidan’s page in the bingo book and slides it across the desk. “I’d like to know everything there is to know.”

She takes the book in her hand and studies the page. It has Hidan’s photograph, a written description of his appearance additionally, his age with his exact birthdate marked as unknown, a list of his criminal activity – theft and a record of serial murder –, a short rundown of his abilities, and lastly his bounty of thirty million ryo.

“There are many things to add,” Izumi agrees after a while and slides the book back.

“I’ve heard about his immortality.”  
She raises an eyebrow at him. “There are rumours of it. Yugakure has sent many people after him, some of them our most skilled shinobi, yet none of them returned successfully, or returned at all. As much as it pains me to say it: that boy is a monster. Are you sure about this?”

He nods decidedly. “Very sure.”

“Very well then. His story is a cruel albeit tragic one. We don’t know much about his background to be perfectly honest. He was found by our returners from the frontlines fifteen years ago. My husband was with them at the time. He said the kid didn’t talk much and seemed confused. Later they came across a village in the mountains and found all its people slain. We assume it must have been the result of a clash between Konoha and Kumo shinobi that took the poor boy’s home. However, he was found miles away from that place. We don’t know how he made it but he later confirmed that that village had been his home. We took him into our care at Yugakure. With the war still going on, he was also chosen to attend the academy.”

She gets up from her chair and standing up she is still slumped, almost doubled over. Her spine cracks. At the shelf with the photographs she finds one and brings it over. It is a typical team photograph of genin nin with their leader. The three children aren’t older than ten, two boys and a girl. One of the boys is unmistakably Hidan with the silver hair and magenta eyes staring grimly into the camera. He’s visibly uncomfortable being where he is. The other boy has a nondescript face, looks like any ten-year-old out there. The girl is dark-haired and the only one smiling. Their team leader is an old man with a greying beard covering most of his face and a stern air around him. He’s the same person as in the photographs Izumi has on her desk.

She notices his observation. “Oh, that is my husband. He passed away in that war. He was a good man.” Her eyes become dark. “Well, Hidan… he was unable to learn ninjutsu, not to say genjutsu, but he was talented in hand-to-hand combat. More than that he was extraordinary with a weapon in his hand.” She sighs. “In retrospect we should have seen the signs. There was darkness in him, that was very clear from the beginning but we were foolish enough to think that community could cure it. After my husband’s team finished their education it didn’t take long for them to be dispatched to a battlefield.”

She pauses. Meanwhile Kakuzu keeps his eyes on the photograph. This is a different Hidan than the one he knows, even different from the one in the bingo book. This is a kid with no signs of ever becoming one to wear an obnoxious smile at the most ill-fitting times. On the contrary, this kid looks world-weary despite his young age.

“They died there,” Izumi continues with a tremble in her voice, “Everyone from our village who was sent out. They fell victim to the war, but-” She takes a deep breath. “Well, it was a complex situation. My husband’s team escaped to a point where they could recharge their strength. We kept in contact through our summoned familiars. That is how we back in Yugakure knew that he and his team must have been safe at one point. Yet when the battle was entirely over, Hidan was the only one to return alive and unharmed. He said he had been separated from his team just after the familiar was gone. We could recover their bodies later, they were… they were thrown into a deep crevice at the road side.”

Kakuzu sets the photograph down. “You mean to insinuate that he killed them.”

“It’s my honest assessment, yes,” Izumi says as she rounds the table to sit down once again, “I have no proof of it, though, so it was forgotten and I never learnt how my husband truly died. It is a possibility and if you ask me, no good ever came from Hidan. He was a mean child, kept to himself a lot and was quick to provoke into fights. So when Yugakure was finally at peace, it came as no surprise to us that we would defect from the village if it meant that he could keep doing as he pleased. That was around the time this photo was taken.” She nods at the bingo book.

Looking back and forth between a ten and a seventeen-year-old Hidan makes him really aware of how different these two people are. “Do you happen to know about a supposed god called Jashin?”

Izumi stops short and for that long moment she stares at Kakuzu like she wants to examine every part of his face. He knows that look too well but decades of being exposed to it have made him good at staying unimpressed by it. They want to figure him out and by now Izumi has already realised that he might not be just a bounty hunter trying to make just a little money from what is left of the war. “Hidan talked about something of that name. But first I must ask you: what have _you_ heard about it?”

He’s heard a few things about it. Hidan never actually talked about his religion’s background, only the intricacies of the rituals and the philosophy behind it. “Jashinism is, supposedly, a religious cult in this country. Or was.” Not a cult but a religion, he remembers Hidan scolding him. He glances at the bingo book again. “It is connected to how he became an immortal.”

Izumi nods slowly. “There was such a cult. It came into being five years ago but who knows how many years they were just keeping low. Its members freed Hidan when he had just been captured by our anbu forces, that’s how we know that he had a connection to them.”

“Had?”

“We found their hideouts in the mountains but there was no living person left. As far as we learnt they worshipped death and decay, so this might have led to their self-destruction. They were slain by someone but we found no signs of a struggle.”

“Your conclusion is that it was once again him who killed them all.”

“Death follows that child, sir. Wherever he goes, people die. Whoever follows him dies. I’ve said it before but that boy is a monster that is only satisfied by bloodshed. It would do good to the world if he was to be put down. Especially since we finally found peace again.”

Kakuzu bites back everything he could say about Hidan, but most of his questions have an answer now. The last one he has is one that only Hidan can answer. He stands up and bows respectfully before Izumi. “That would be everything I need to know. Thank you for your time.”

“Take care,” Izumi says, “Wherever he is, I’m sure he’s only bringing death. I hope you will succeed.”

He doesn’t give an answer to that and leaves. The jonin kid is waiting outside to lead him back to the academy’s entrance but he ignores him most of the way. He doesn’t stay the night in Yugakure and leaves while the sun is already setting. Konohagakure will be a few days of travel.

Wherever Hidan is, Kakuzu will find him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just what is up with Hidan, hm?


	19. Chapter Nineteen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hidan's going through it.

All that is left of him is awareness. It’s something detached from himself, like he’s looking down on himself but sees nothing anymore. Like he’s become a ghost.

It’s not death.

He isn’t dying.

He wants to die.

Hidan is stuck between the two plains of life and death and his body clings to life while everything he can think of is how badly he wants to die.

Because living hurts. Being alive means pain. Being alive means that his mind drifts off to sleep and nightmares make him want to scream. It means that he wakes up and wishes he hadn’t. Being alive means that the maggots can still feast on him and it means wondering how much of him is left. There are bugs and worms nesting in his throat and eye socket.

The darkness makes it all worse. He can’t see any of the things he knows are there and a while ago – an eternity ago – he started wondering if they were even there at all. Maybe his mind started playing tricks on him and he only exists in a big nothing, cursed to stay alive and experience it all.

Hidan knows death, knows what it feels like. It’s something good and pure that hugs him tightly when he experiences it through another person. It’s liberating in how final it is.

But this… this is what being alive feels like. It tastes like bugs and earth, feels like choking and looks like nothingness.

The pain of death feels good because it eventually ends.

The pain of living holds onto him, clings to him like it wants to crash him with thorns gentle enough to draw it out. And Hidan knows that it won’t end because something doesn’t allow him to die.

He prays and no one answers and he stops. Jashin doesn’t talk to him.

***

The people in the mountains find out that he can’t die and they use him. They smile while they cut him up, they pull their faces into interested grimaces, but they never frown. To them, he’s an object to be studied, an animal to be dissected, a plaything to destroy except they can’t destroy him and he regenerates at an almost faster rate than they can damage him.

They say they’re followers of Jashin, that this is their work, that he is lucky to have been chosen by this god.

Hidan hates them.

Who are they to know what Jashin wants?

***

There is no one left to pray to and he stops begging for someone to listen to him. There is no one there but the bugs and the worms and the maggots eating away at him.

Maybe they are the real gods in this world. In death everyone becomes a part of them. Maybe they are mortal gods always recreating themselves by eating each other too.

Hidan wants to give himself to them and die but his body keeps healing while his mind continues fracturing into pieces.

***

They have found ways to keep him quiet and calm. Ways to tie him up so that he can’t escape or even think about it. His wrists are rubbed raw by chains and in a constant process of healing. It itches unbearably, blood trickling down his arms. In the beginning they have let him scream and struggle, told him that he would soon realise the way of Jashin and understand what fate was foreseen for him. When they come to close to him, he tries to bite them, tells them that he’ll claw their eyes out and tear them apart limb by limb.

The answer he gets is enthusiastic and blissful. The person bringing him food once a week tells him that they all expect to die by his hands.

He keeps fighting and eventually they drug him. Every hour he is fed a mixture of different plants that makes him unable to grasp a single thought and his body goes numb and powerless.

They keep cutting him up, try to understand how his regeneration works and find nothing. They’re mad, doing it again day after day and expecting to suddenly understand everything.

Day after day knives and scalpels go into his body, cut at his veins and organs, and then he’s left by himself to heal it all up again.

Maybe it is what Jashin wants. Maybe it is possible that they really understood something he hasn’t. People don’t do such things when they don’t expect something to eventually work out. That had to be it.

“I understand,” he tells the person bringing him food.

They smile up at him and soon they gather together, all of them, even faces he has never seen before. A knife goes around and they spill blood from their hands into a goblet. They make him drink it all to the last drop.

His chains are taken off and he drops to the ground, his shoulders crack back into place, his raw wrists heal closed and his hands… his skin turns a dark, inky black and white lines appear between the knuckles and his ribcage. It’s painless and it’s what is the most confusing about it all.

Someone hands him a dagger, long and sleek, a little too heavy for him in his state but he takes it anyway. Looking around they wait for him to do something.

He understands.

They wait for him to make them immortal.

He understands.

After all their experiments stabbing himself in the heart doesn’t even feel as painful anymore. It’s a dull ache where a heart is supposed to beat, instead blood oozes out and runs between his fingers.

It’s what Jashin wants.

One by one the people around him collapse, clutching at their chest where their clothes start to bloom red. The taste of copper is in Hidan’s mouth and his nose and his throat, it’s red on his hands and skin. They die around him like flies while he keeps living.

Death embraces him without killing him. It feels good, makes his head spin with pleasure while he feels lives end through him.

He’s surrounded by corpses and pools of blood then.

He understands.

Jashin loves him for the death he brings, allows him to feel pleasure as long as he keeps sending him souls. Jashin craves death and Hidan shall bring it for him.

***

A part of him hopes that he’ll die eventually. If Jashin left him, then so would his immortality and he would finally be granted to die.

He doesn’t understand anything anymore. If he wasn’t needed anymore, why wasn’t he allowed to die? If he wasn’t needed anymore, would he then finally die soon? It’s the only hope he has left and then it is destroyed when he wakes up again.

He wakes up again and it’s still dark, still cold, still painful because he’s still alive and aware of it all.

Time is a word that he once knew the meaning of.

Being alive hurts.

He wants to die.

He sleeps and when he wakes up, the earth breaks open and it’s bright and something warm wraps around him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Getting closer to The RevealTM I've been hyping myself up to write ever since I started this fic.


	20. Chapter Twenty

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The RevealTM! I've been building up to this for twenty chapters.

Finding the place hasn’t been easy. Kakuzu has had to track back to where their fight with the Konoha shinobi had taken place and find the vaguest tracks he could still find after all this time. In the end, the Nara forest is an obvious choice. The shadow kid would have wanted to fight on ground that he knew well.

The area he choose for digging hasn’t grown over with grass yet, so it’s promising. Deer try to keep him away from it and stags with strong antlers attack him. He leaves their dead bodies where he kills them. Earth style techniques help him shovel out dirt and worms. It is night, a full moon in the sky, when he finds limbs.

An arm is first, the fingers on the hand crooked and broken in multiple places but the scratched nail polish tells him it’s Hidan’s. He finds more. The other arm, legs and feet all torn apart and bitten bloody by vermin, two halves of the torso. The flesh is simultaneously rotten and fresh. Whatever Kakuzu finds, he arranges together.

He finds the head last.

It smells like the rot of death, the neck wound oozing blood, pus and maggots. One of his eye sockets is empty and bugs flee from it. The other one is halfway eaten up, too, only a mass of goo left of it, the pupil swimming in it having lost all form. Hidan’s hair is thin, a dull grey instead of shining silver. His skin is ashen and straining over his bones, his cheeks hollow and riddled with holes where insect fed from him. His throat is filled with dirt and insects and getting it out of him is ugly.

Hidan looks like a corpse and doesn’t react when Kakuzu picks him up gently to set him down with the other parts and begins his work.

He stitches together what he can, starting with the biggest parts that are left. Hidan doesn’t move at all, doesn’t even flinch when threads pierce through him and pull his body parts back together. In between his work Kakuzu catches him heal the smaller wounds. The holes in the skin stretching over his cheek slowly grow closed again and where Kakuzu stitches him together the sinews and bone connect to each other once more. At one point the healing process pushes more earth and maggots out of Hidan’s mouth and the first sound he makes comes from breathless coughing. His eye regenerates finally and he blinks, his other eyelid still closing over nothing. Tears dwell up in it and run down his cheeks and into his dirty hair.

Kakuzu ignores it for now in favour of putting all of Hidan together, reattaching his arms and legs to the torso, toes to the feet and fingers to the hands. The head comes last, its one-eyed stare staring past Kakuzu and up into the sky, the pupil wide and reflecting the moonlight.

Hidan is a mess of half-rotten limbs and stitches crossing his body everywhere. He still has more in common with a corpse than a living, breathing human being.

The second sound he makes is a pained, choked off gurgle when the heart in his chest – smashed by rubble – has regrown and started beating again, sending a jolt through his body. Circulation returns blood to all parts of his body and Kakuzu feels the hand he’s holding get warmer again.

Hidan’s eye widens and his body shakes, toes digging into dirt trying to find hold, fingers clawing into the ground and closing too tightly around Kakuzu’s. Hurried, Hidan scrambles to his side and vomits earth and maggots, coughs out torn leaves and worms from his lungs where his body rejects them now.

When it’s all out the trembling doesn’t stop and the coughs become sobs just short of pitiful screams.

“Hidan.”

The sound of his voice makes Hidan freeze and turn around slowly. His eye is still wide, in shock and horror, his face twisted into pure despair that hurts Kakuzu to look at. This Hidan is different yet again from the ten-year-old on the team photo, the seventeen-year-old on the wanted posters and the one Kakuzu used to travel with. This Hidan is broken and aware of it.

His hands comes up to reach out for Kakuzu. His whole body has thinned out and his fingers are skinny. He touches Kakuzu’s shoulder and another sob shakes his body. He tries to say something, his mouth opens and closes while his lips try to form words but no sound comes out but a breathy, raw whisper.

“I’m sorry,” Kakuzu says, “I should have-”

Hidan’s arms are around him then, holding onto him with fingers digging weakly into his back while Hidan buries his face in his chest. He’s not crying but close, his voice almost silent and strained. “Don’t ever leave me. Don’t ever leave me again. _Please_.”  
Kakuzu gathers Hidan up in his arms and holds him as tightly as he can without breaking him. It’s a silent promise. “I should have come sooner, I’m sorry.”

Hidan doesn’t let go of him for a while longer, doesn’t want to but eventually has to when all his strength leaves him. He can barely even keep himself sitting upright.

They can’t stay here. Kakuzu carries him out of the Nara forest and away from Konoha.

***

The moon is blindingly bright in his eye and Hidan holds on to Kakuzu as best as he can. Kakuzu is warm and strong under his grip, rough where Hidan’s fingers trace the stitches, but secure all the same. His own body is weaker than ever before, malnutritioned and almost fragile. Starvation won’t kill him but it makes him pathetic and helpless. He vaguely remembers where he was and where they are going.

Eventually Kakuzu sets him down on a cot in an abandoned hunting cabin in the middle of the woods and wraps him into a dark cloak to replace the warmth he just lost. He makes a fire in the fireplace and the room quickly warms up. From a bag Kakuzu grabs dried meat and a flask with water, both of which Hidan eats and drinks down eagerly. His stomach aches in protest but he manages to keep it down. He feels better afterwards. Where his limbs are stitched together the healing process starts up again and grows new muscles and sinew and bone. There’s a crack in his ribcage when the vertebrae readjusts. The pain of it travels up his throat and then is gone again. His mouth tastes like earth and blood and the salt of the meat.

Kakuzu silently watches him eat and heal.

“You’re still alive.”

“I thought you died.”

They speak at the same time. Hidan lets out a bitter chuckle. He’s still alive, yes. It only hurts less because Kakuzu is with him again.

Kakuzu sighs. “I did die, in a way.” He picks up a kunai and rams it through his hand.

Hidan flinches hard and scrambles to get to his side. Kakuzu can’t just do that. Why would he do that? He gathers his hand between his own.

There’s no blood. The edges of the wound look like torn paper and it is already closing again. Hidan keeps holding it anyway. It’s still a warm hand and reminds him that this is real, that he isn’t just dreaming. Kakuzu is here with him. “What… what happened to you?”

“You were in that hole for almost a year, Hidan.”

A year.

A lot can change in a year.

It felt longer than that.

He just stares at Kakuzu, too stunned to speak. When he looks closer, he notices that the red of his eyes is no longer red but instead black surrounding green.

Suddenly Kakuzu talks about war and battlefields, about people dying, about dreams that last forever and peace that came over night.

A lot can change in a year.

“What about the Akatsuki?” Kakuzu isn’t wearing the cloak. “What happened?”

“They’re gone,” Kakuzu says and Hidan tries to figure out what his voice sounds like. Like regret maybe, he talks so carefully. “All of them. Officially we’re all dead.”

“Officially?”

“Well, the two of us are still alive.”

Hidan lets go of Kakuzu’s hand and moves to sit next to him, leaning his head against his shoulder and staring into the fireplace. Flames lick their way into the room but are held away by the stone ground. The stitches on his torso draw together a little tighter, he feels his new heart beat against them. “Fuck.”

“Hm.”

“Then… then Deidara is dead too.”

“Yeah.”

Hidan tried to remember what he thought about it all. He’d thought about what he would think if someone like Deidara died. He remembers Amegakure and endless rain around them. The devastation in Deidara’s face when they told them about Sasori’s death. Deidara is dead now too and it leaves Hidan feeling a little empty.

“Pain is dead,” Kakuzu continues, “Konan. Itachi, Kisame, even Tobi. Everyone.”

“Shit.”

A lot can change in a year.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner,” Kakuzu says.

“Shut up!” It’s the quickest reaction his body has been able to follow since he returned to the surface again. “Just… just don’t ever leave me alone again.” He thinks that he would really break in this time. As he is now he can still heal. The tears on his chest start to close and skin grows over the wounds.

“I won’t,” Kakuzu promises.

“Good.”

“We’ll stay here until you’re all healed up.”

Hidan nods against his shoulder.

“Anywhere you want to go?”

“Hm?”

“Do you want to go after the Nara kid? Sacrifice him to your god?”

“Hm, no.” Hidan shakes his head. He’s surprised that he means it. He should be furious maybe, angry with hot blood pumping through him until his wrath is satisfied by the Nara kid’s spilt blood. But he doesn’t crave it at all. He wishes for nothing like it. “Wherever you want to go is fine.”

He eats a little more before exhaustion takes over. When he falls asleep it’s with all his limbs attached to him and wrapped around Kakuzu, not meaning to let him go any time soon, face buried between his neck and shoulder, breathing him in. Kakuzu smells like metal, like the weapons he carries, like paper too. It’s calming.

The next day he finds his body working more or less properly again. His limbs have completely reattached and Kakuzu takes the stitches out, only leaving deep red markings that will fade with a little more time. His eye is still missing, however, the socket feels hollow and numb. No pain comes from it, only an itch when the wind becomes a little stronger.

It’s almost winter again but they still leave the cabin for the river down the valley. Walking is something he needs to get used to again and he only makes it down the slope with shaky legs and having to lean against trees every now and then to catch his breath. “I thought you’d do worse,” Kakuzu says.

“Look at you complimenting me.”

“Can’t I?”

“You’re too nice to me, it’s creepy.” Nevertheless he lets Kakuzu help him climb over tall, fat roots where the forest around them is thickest. The river is a clean, grey stream, smelling as cold as it feels when he dips his toes in. Winter sun doesn’t warm waters after all. “It’s fucking freezing.”

Kakuzu huffs a sigh between exasperation and fondness. “You were infested with maggots until recently. Just take a damn bath, you don’t have to make it long.”

“Will you wait?”

“I’ll wait.”

“Okay.”

Kakuzu does wait. Hidan keeps his eyes on him as he undresses and helps himself wade through the water to where it gets deep enough to submerge himself in. Even when he dunks his head and rinses the dirt from his hair, he watches Kakuzu’s form through the surface. Whenever he turns away for a brief moment his hearbeat picks up with anxiety, fearing that, when he turns around, Kakuzu will be gone. That Hidan will be left alone again.

Despite the coldness the bath feels refreshing and wakes him up fully. Letting himself drift for a short while, he forgets that he’s freezing, above him only the grey winter sky, a dim sun and eerily white clouds. It’s bright. Hidan feels for Jashin’s pendant but doesn’t find it. It’s gone, left somewhere underground in the Nara forest.

Kakuzu throws him a cloth to dry himself of with and Hidan does before dressing in a fresh set of clothes. It’s not nearly warm enough to manage against the temperatures of winter yet to come but for the moment it’s enough.

“You didn’t bring your book,” Hidan says on the way back.

“Lost it.”

“But it was your wife’s.”

“And now it’s somewhere else, if it is even still whole. It was falling apart anyway.”

“Yeah, but...”

“Hidan, I don’t miss it.”

“Oh.” Hidan watches the ground under his feet. With his body cleaner than before now his wounds heal up a little more again. The red streaks they leave around his legs fade away completely, leaving only the scars on his torso and neck.

In the evening, Kakuzu tells him more about the war, then other wars. Hidan lies his head down on his chest and listens to the soft rumble of Kakuzu’s voice until he falls asleep.

They leave the cabin behind when the winds become even cooler and travel along the road next to the river. Despite going north, it only seems to become warmer. He walks behind Kakuzu and wonders. Kakuzu doesn’t wear his hood anymore. Instead his hair is hanging down to his shoulders, made messy by the wind, and he only wears a scarf up to his nose to hide the stitches in his face. Hidan wears a shred of that scarf as a makeshift eye-patch so he wouldn’t scare any travellers they’d meet. Somewhere along the border between the Land of Fire and the Land of Grass Kakuzu buys a glass eye for him and gets them a room for the night.

Hidan lets the prothesis roll around in his palm. It’s light, the iris a reddish brown as common in the people around here. It’s the closest thing to magenta, Hidan guesses, but the difference will be obvious.

“Why isn’t it regrowing?”

Hidan shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“It could be Jashin’s punishment because I didn’t do rituals for a year. The rest of me is healing just fine.” To demonstrate he pulls his sleeves up. He doesn’t need stitches anywhere anymore and within the next few days all his scars will have disappeared too, as though nothing ever happened. The missing eye is the only thing that’s different about him.

Kakuzu crosses his arms und rolls his eyes. “It’s either this or wearing an eye-patch forever, Hidan. Try it out.”

Hidan makes a grimace down at the eye and after a bit more of hesitation and Kakuzu’s impatient grunt, he pops it in. It fits well but he’s not used to the feeling of having something in his socket anymore. Blinking feels dry the first few times. As he expected, his eyes look more mismatched than anything else when he looks into the bathroom mirror.

“It looks alright,” Kakuzu says, sitting down against the inn’s bed’s headboard and producing a newspaper from his bag.

“I guess,” Hidan half-heartedly agrees, dressing down from his winter cloak. The inn’s room is warm, even had hot water in the bath, and the bed sheets look soft and comfortable.

Kakuzu accomodates him when Hidan flops down next to him to wrap his arms around him. For a while he tries to keep up with Kakuzu’s reading speed but gives up after the first page turn in favour of pressing kisses against his shoulder.

When the page turning stops, Hidan smiles against him and trails more kisses up Kakuzu’s neck until he reaches his lips. With one hand he fishes for the newspaper and crumples it up to throw it to the ground and straddle Kakuzu whose hands come to settle on his thighs.

“I wanna do it,” he whispers between kisses, pressing himself down and closer, their tongues sliding against each other.

“You sure?”

Hidan bites down on Kakuzu’s jaw. “Yeah.” Before he knows it his back hits the mattress and his hair is splayed around him over the pillow, Kakuzu a hot and solid presence above him.

They’re taking it slow but Hidan still drags his fingernails down Kakuzu’s back and Kakuzu still roughly tugs at his hair as a form of pleasureable punishment, and still it’s gentle between them. It never hurts more than Hidan likes.

After the Land of Grass they go for the Land of Earth, up into the mountains. The memory of their defeat is still fresh in Hidan’s mind, the first time he feared for Kakuzu’s life while they were fleeing from Iwagakure and travelling with barely any rations and only three hearts between them. In winter the mountain paths become even trickier from snow and slippery frost.

They spent most nights in caves where the snow and wind don’t reach them and they can light up camp fires without any problems. Hidan sleeps wedged between Kakuzu and the fire mask creature because he still complained about the cold.

“You’re such a nuisance,” Kakuzu mumbles into his hair.

Hidan grips the hand that’s slung around him a little tighter. “Not getting rid of me.”

When he wakes up on their third day in the mountains it’s because he’s cold.

The cave is empty and dark, only a few embers still burning in the makeshift fireplace. Hidan hurries to blow on them and make them into warm flames again. His breath his shaky, his hands are trembling and he wants to throw up.

All the thoughts from his time in the earth come flooding back to him.

Kakuzu abandoned him. He left him alone here. He always wanted to get rid of him and now he left Hidan behind.

The embers go out one by one and the cave becomes dark.

It’s dark, it’s cold, he’s alone.

He doesn’t scream, forgets how. His throat is filled with earth again and he tastes maggots and bile. A weight pulls at his lungs and doesn’t let him breathe. It feels like dying but he still lives through it.

Hours pass and the sun rises outside. It doesn’t make the world brighter, hidden behind dark grey clouds spitting snow and blowing harsh winds around the mountains. From up here the world is… he doesn’t know, most likely ending.

Evening comes too fast. Hidan has gotten used to seeing the day start and end again, the exchange between sun and moon bringing back rhythm and a sense of time. But that’s all lost again. Maybe two days have past without him even noticing through the dizzy haze of panic washing over him in waves of cold sweat and little deaths. Underneath the scars on his chest, his heart beats hard and painful against his ribs, threatening to break through them.

Kakuzu abandoned him.

Eventually the anxiety knocks him out from exhaustion again.

A light kick to the shoulder wakes him up again. The cave is still cold but a new fire is already crackling in the fireplace. Hidan looks up and stares right at Kakuzu who is scowling down at him. There’s small splatters of blood in his face and a few drops of it and snow are caught in his scarf.

Hidan scrambles to his feet and shakes him by the shoulders. “You- you fucking- you _left!_ ”

“Hidan-”

“You were gone!” He hates himself for being so pathetic as to cling to Kakuzu so vehemently, with tears welling up in his eyes and his fingers cramping where they dig into Kakuzu’s back. “Don’t do that! Don’t fucking leave me!”

Kakuzu’s arms come up around his shoulders and hold him tightly for a long moment. “I’m-”

“Don’t say you’re sorry.” Hidan shoves a pointed finger at his chest and draws back again to look him in the eye. What he finds there is such genuine concern that he wants to scream and rips his hair out.

Kakuzu nods towards the cave’s wall. “I went to collect a bounty. I had every intention of coming back, you know?”

Sure enough, there is a man leaning against the rocks. His hands and feet are tied together tightly and a piece of cloth in his mouth prevents him from speaking while he just stares up at the two of them. His dark hair is wet with sweat and snow, his skin pale with fear.

“He’s still alive,” Hidan notes.

“It’s for you,” Kakuzu says, “It’s been a long time since your last ritual, hasn’t it?”

Hidan gapes at him, mouth opening and closing repeatedly. His heartbeat picks up again and the urge to vomit rises in his throat again. “Kakuzu...”

“Go ahead.”

Hidan licks his lips, his whole mouth suddely dry. A part of him wants to taste blood, another part just wants to get it over with. He takes the kunai Kakuzu offers him and walks up to the frightened man cowering against the cave’s wall.

The act of killing is normal to him, familiar. Spilling blood was his profession for the longest time and it doesn’t disgust him. On the contrary, he enjoyed it most of the time. There was no kill that didn’t feel good in some way, especially when he got to drink his victims’ blood first. Killing the man in front of him feels like nothing. Not digusting. Not euphoric in any way.

It’s a hollow death of a man Hidan doesn’t care about.

From a slash across his neck he bleeds out, blood soaking the front of his clothes, and he sinks into lifelessness.

Hidan cleans the kunai on the leg of the man’s trousers and throws it back to Kakuzu who catches it easily. He avoids looking at him, however, doesn’t want to see the incredulous, questioning gaze directed at him. He suppresses a sigh of relief when Kakuzu attends to the fresh body and hoists it up to store it outside in the cold.

When he comes back snow cold arms wrap around Hidan.

He flinches. “Fucking hell, you’re cold. Get off!”

Kakuzu doesn’t let him go, only loosens his grip enough that Hidan can turn around to face him. Hidan keeps pushing at him but it’s fruitless.

“Hidan,” he says calmly.

“What? Shit, I’m gonna freeze because of you.”

“There are things that don’t make sense.”

 _I know, fuck, I know_. “Like what, asshole?” Struggling is pointless now. Even looking away and pretending that nothing is wrong won’t save him from his anymore. Instead he tries to meet Kakuzu’s gaze with the same stubbornness, imitating his frown.

“Who is Jashin, Hidan?”

Hidan tastes his heartbeat in his throat, his mouth dry and his fingers dig into his own arms where he has them crossed over his chest. “He’s-”

“It’s not true, right? Nothing of what you told me about him is actually true.”

“What? Kakuzu, hold on, what are you talking about?” His voice is trembling, comes out hoarse and insecure. He tries to laugh it off but it’s a pathetic, nervous chuckle betraying everything.

“The rules of your ritual are inconsistent. Sometimes it takes only a few minutes and other times hours. You don’t even need to stand in your symbol for it, do you? I’ve seen you inflict wounds onto others without it. You don’t need it at all.”

“Hey… hey, shut-”

“Jashinism itself didn’t come up until a few years ago and then it died out just as quickly. I talked to people in Yugakure and you knew about Jashin a lot sooner than that. Hidan, tell me the truth. You made it all up, is that right?”

Hidan pushes at his shoulders more insistently but Kakuzu doesn’t budge. Even when he clenches his fist and wants to punch him in the face, Kakuzu catches his hand and pushes it down to his side. “You don’t need to know shit about that!”

“Hidan-”

“Shut the fuck up!” Screaming hurts in his throat, the taste of bile is still there and tastes like poison. If it weren’t for Kakuzu’s hold on him, he would run.

“I don’t care if you don’t want to hear it. You need to,” Kakuzu goes on, catching Hidan’s other wrist before his hand can scratch his face, “Jashin and everything around him, you made it all up.”

“No! Why would I do that?” Hidan still pulls at his hold. “It doesn’t make sense for me to do that.”

“You were a traumatised kid. You were trying to make sense of everything that happened to you.”

Hidan stills, freezing where he’s standing and just stares at Kakuzu. He hates the prickling of tears in his eye and the first spill over his face. All words die in his throat, not even a croak leaves him, like something pulls tight around his neck and wants to suffocate him.

“Hidan, say something.”

_What am I supposed to say?_

“What happened to you?”

It all breaks out of him at once. The sobs, the words, the panic. “I don’t know! I don’t know! Kakuzu, I don’t know! Let go of me!” The closeness makes it even harder to breathe, chokes him. There’s earth and worms and maggots in his throat.

Kakuzu lets him go and without him holding him up Hidan collapses to his knees and throws up. Nothing comes out but sour spit and choked coughs.

***

Hidan is six, lost in the mountains, and finds a grave. The inscription says Jashin. It’s a forgotten tombstone with corroded letters and a fading presence. A few more winters and it would be forgotten, nothing left of it but a stone with a smooth surface and no letters left to decipher. No one in the village ever leaves to visit it and Hidan is alone with the person that rotted away in the ground. He tells himself that death won’t come to him, that the dead protect the living from meeting an early end. Stories his mother told him. Whoever Jashin is, they are watching over him here.

Jashin guides someone this far into the mountains and Hidan is found. At home his mother’s face is wet with tears when she hugs him tightly again.

A year later blood floods the roads.

Hidan doesn’t die.

When he is eight, people find him in the woods, far away from his home. He doesn’t know the way back. He survived on his own, unable to die, but he doesn’t tell them that. He says that he lived off berries he found, hunted small animals, that his father had been a hunter and taught him how to do these things. They give him sympathetic smiles and take him in.

On their travels they pass the Valley of Hell again and the crater with the blood red water finally has a name for Hidan to call it. Of all the places he’s been to, it felt the least like hell. There were corpses all around him, but they were peaceful and watched over him. Now they are all gone. The shinobi tell him that he made them up, that his young mind would do such things, especially after what he went through. It’s normal, they say.

Hidan learns how to fight and he becomes good at it. Has to be good at it to avoid getting hit by anything that would leave a wound his body would heal too quickly.

On the battlefield he is cut and his body is torn open, his head is smashed against rocky ground and it all happens so fast that he doesn’t comprehend it at first. With dirt in his mouth and blood dripping from his nose he is sat up by the girl in his team while his team leader and the other boy fight whoever attacked him.

He has given up on thinking he would die. The wounds are closing already while the girl still searches for them. Her fingers rip through his clothes where they are the most blood soaked and find nothing but smooth skin. He pushes her away, tells her it wasn’t his own blood and jumps back into battle. There are enough people to kill here. He can try to keep up his act a little longer.

His teammates whisper behind his back. The other boy is injured, his leg sliced open and it slows all of them down. They summon a familiar and send it on its way to Yugakure. The girl does the best she can, the cut closing a little more after she tends to it. When Hidan tells them that he’ll die anyway, they shush him. The girl and their team leader talk about him when they think he’s not there to listen. She tells him about the injuries he doesn’t have, the injuries he should have.

When she is exhausted at night, Hidan kills her first. Silently, pressing a hand on her mouth while he slices her throat open and blood gushes from the cut. Her wide, pleading, pain filled eyes stare at him, begging for mercy. He kills the other boy next.

The team leader is more difficult. He wakes up when the boy breathes out his last air, just in time to see him die. When he fights it is desperate, wrathful and almost devastating to watch him grieve. It’s that same uncontrollable fighting spirit that makes the man careless. Hidan kills him too.

When he finds other people from Yugakure, he tells them that they were suddenly ambushed and only he himself managed to escape alive.

He’s seventeen and peace has come. It’s not alright, no matter how many times the village elders say it is. Nothing is alright. All the death has been pointless, all the dying has been fruitless. Hidan needs to kill until everyone is dead and gone, heretics first.

He kills someone, doesn’t care who it is, and Yugakure declares him outlawed.

When he’s eighteen he’s captured again. By now they discovered his immortality and have given up on trying to kill him, focusing on methods to keep him tied up and immobile. The cultists save him, bring him to their hideouts in the mountains and tell him about gods.

They tell him about himself. About Jashin and about his immortality. He’s supposed to witness it all, they say, all the death in the world. He’s supposed to see the end of everything and he isn’t allowed to die before the world itself has died.

They cut him open, teach him about true pain and the pleasures of it. They teach him what he can do with blood, and finally, they want him to kill them first.

He does.

Jashin watches over him.

***

No one watches over him. There are no gods that answer his prayers. Clinging to them any longer is a thing born from loneliness, from the madness that came with it. His face is wet with tears and his arms tremble from keeping him up when he wants to let himself collapse. He doesn’t want Kakuzu to see him like this but there he is right in front of him, watching with all the damn honest concern in his face that Hidan wants to scratch to shreds.

“They were… I don’t know. I don’t know anything, okay?” His voice is still rough and dry, interrupted by shaky sobs. “I don’t know why I’m like this. I thought… I really believed for a while that Jashin was a god and that he made me like this but…” A sob and a bitter chuckle shake through him. “What kind of god has a fucking gravestone?”

“They formed that religion around you,” Kakuzu says but it’s not a question. He has let himself slide down the cave’s wall until he’s sitting just a few feet away from Hidan, giving him space but also close enough that Hidan can reach out to him. “That’s fucked up.”

“It’s fucked up,” Hidan agrees. He sits up, back turned to Kakuzu, and wipes his face. Having dust and dirt stick to him is better than tears. The fire is bright and warm too and dry them quickly, leaving only a sting in his eyes. “There’s no gods, Kakuzu. There never were.”

It would help if there were, he thinks. That’s why he’s clung to the idea of Jashin, of a god that allows him to make sense of his not being able to die, of his bloodlust.

“You’re-”

“I’m traumatised,” Hidan interrupts him, “Yeah, got it.” His face feels dry enough to make him feel less self-conscious and he turns to look at Kakuzu. “I still want to die.”

Kakuzu nods. “I haven’t forgotten. I’ll find a way.”

Hidan manages an unsure grin. “How do you want to do it?”

“We’ll have to find out what made you immortal first before even thinking about finding ways to kill you.” Kakuzu sighs. “We’ll have to do lots of research, visits lots of different temples and religious customs. It won’t be easy. It would be best to start in Yugakure. Do you think you can handle that?”

Hidan hesitates but nods eventually. “I can handle it. Spent most of my life there after all.”

“Alright.”

“Alright.” Hidan drags himself over to Kakuzu and climbs into his lap. “You like me a lot, right?”

Kakuzu turns his face away from him and prevents him from following him anyway with a hand closing around his jaw. “You just threw up. I’m not kissing you.”

Hidan grins and even to himself it feels honest for the first time in a long time. He presses a kiss against Kakuzu’s wrist instead and buries his face between the other’s neck and shoulder. It’s a safe spot, secure and he trusts that when he falls asleep, Kakuzu will still be there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There it is.  
> And we still have two chapters left. We're nearing the end. Feels like yesterday that I started this fic, honestly, I didn't think I'd be finishing it this quickly.  
> Also sidenote: Hidan being a little sad over Deidara is just me being sad over Deidara. I liked Deidara.


	21. Chapter Twenty-One

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry for the unannounced radio silence. I was, as the cool kids say, going through it mental health-wise, especially with the election going on and so on.  
> There are only two chapters left and this is one of them.  
> Thank you everyone who has read this far! <3

Kakuzu exchanges the dead man for another bounty. It’s something lowly, something he wouldn’t have thought about twice when they were still part of the Akatsuki. Anything below twenty million was barely worth his attention and here he is selling off the dead man for meager five million.

“It’s more than enough,” he tells Hidan.

“It’s nothing,” Hidan objects, “You can’t do anything with it.”

“It’ll afford us hotels, food and new clothes when we need it.”

Hidan gapes at him for a moment. “Since when are you so… ?”

“So?”

“Generous? Agreeable?”

“Don’t get used to it.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Hidan bites back mockingly.

He doesn’t object these new comforts however. Sleeping in a comfortable bed regularly helps the last areas of his body recover to the last cell and access to clean facilities helps take care of the glass eye. The glass eye becomes less of an issue once he has properly gotten used to it and after a while he’s able to ignore it when passing by a mirror.

Winter is another reason – the main reason, according to Kakuzu – that they’re more often than not staying at an inn whenever possible. They’ll share a bed and body warmth and sometimes more than just that, leaving them both warm and satisfied.

Hidan has his arms around Kakuzu’s chest and is content lying there. He has someone to spend his immortal life with, someone he doesn’t have to worry about when it comes to dying. Kakuzu has shown him the effects of the Edo Tensei that are still reigning his body. He doesn’t bleed anymore, just disintegrates into dust before his body puts itself together again.

“It’s a little weird,” he confesses into Kakuzu’s shoulder.

“What?”

“That you’re like this now, too.”

Kakuzu glances down from the newspaper. Something about Hokages that Hidan doesn’t care about but Kakuzu seems interested in.

“I’m not complaining,” Hidan tracks back, “I’m glad you’re here with me.” He feels Kakuzu pressing a kiss into his hair.

“I still have to get used to it, too.”

They’ve only been in few fights since their return from the Land of Earth and Hidan watched Kakuzu still dodge incoming attacks out of habit.

“How does it even work with your hearts now?” Hidan props his chin up to look him in the eye.

“They can still be destroyed, just not my own. It will rebuild like the rest of me.”

“Huh.”

“Go to sleep, Hidan.”

“I’m not tired.”

“I think you are.”

Hidan pouts but fits himself into Kakuzu’s side and closes his eyes.

“Hey, give me pocket money,” he says as they cross into the Land of Waterfalls.

Kakuzu sideeyes him, not keeping his eyes off the road like there’s actually something interesting to see apart from cobblestone with moss and dandelions growing in the grooves. “What for?”

“Financial independency?”  
“Hidan, what for?”

Hidan clicks his tongue. “You said we have enough money. We only have ourselves to provide for now and with millions of ryo you can spare me some, so why not?”

Kakuzu sighs. “How much do you need?”

They keep to the country’s border, simply being in Takigakure’s land making Kakuzu uncomfortable, and stay the nights in abandoned hunting cabins and the barns of villages too small to have built their own inns. When they get to a town again, its size is almost overwhelming. There are small shops with local delicacies along the main street, even one advertising taiyaki made after Kusagakure’s tradition with the pastries in the form of fish. Hidan’s mouth waters at the sight and the smell but he pulls himself together. He has to spend the money on something else.

He finds what he’s looking for in a side-street. A wind-torn, wooden sign above the entrance marks the shop as a bookstore and with how old it looks, it seems like the perfect place to find books Kakuzu would like. He grabs the other by the arm and drags him inside before he can protest. Inside it smells like old paper and dust hangs in the air, thick like a curtain. The shelves are instable wooden structures, balanced in a way they won’t collapse, and the books on them are old with yellow pages.

“Choose something. I’ll buy it for you.”

Kakuzu only takes an unimpressed look around. “All of this costs more than what I gave you.”

“You’re always buying things for me, so I want to buy something for you for once. And you like old books. Come on.” Hidan walks between two shelves and cringes when he takes a look at the price tags proving Kakuzu right. “Something must be on sale.”

Kakuzu moves with more purpose than him, directly walking up to a large basket with lots of books carelessly thrown inside it. Hidan watches him read over a few titles before placing them back and settling on a small booklet, merely held together by threads. He hands it over to Hidan. “I’ll wait outside.”

The store’s owner is an old woman with the wrinkles on her forehead so deep it looks like her eyes are closed. She walks out of a backroom when he rings the bell at the counter and only gives him a glance like he doesn’t belong in this place while he pays.

Outside he presses the booklet against Kakuzu’s chest until he takes it and stows it away in his backpack.  
“You could at least say thanks, you know?”

“I didn’t ask for it.”

“I wanted to do something nice for you.”

“In that case, you should spend your money on something more useful.”

Hidan crosses his arms and says nothing. In silence, he follows Kakuzu to one of the shops for take away food, another one of the cheaper inns in town and into their shared room. It’s small as every other room they’ve been in, with only one small window, but the rarity is the small box TV in the corner. The image is grainy and the audio cuts out irregularly but it’s enough of a luxury. With the newscaster talking about the Hokages in the Land of Fire, they eat. When he’s finished with his meal, Hidan flicks to the channels. There’s only five and he stops when he’s at the newsstation again. Sighing he drapes himself across Kakuzu’s lap. Kakuzu spares him a glance and returns his attention to his own meal. Hidan fishes for his bag.

“What’s this even about?”

He finds the book and opens it on the first page. It starts off with a letter. Hidan doesn’t skim it but flips the pages. More letters.

“These are fucking old,” he mumbles, “Almost as old as you.”

Kakuzu puts his food down on the nighttable and picks up the booklet from Hidan’s hands. He skims the first page and flips to the very last page and skims it. “Correspondance between two lovers during the First Shinobi War.”

Hidan scoffs. “Sappy. Why’d you choose that?”

Kakuzu shrugs. “It was within your budget.”

Hidan sits up and moves to straddle him, draping his arms around his shoulders and leaning their foreheads together. “You better read it.”

“Or what?”

“Or I will actually destroy one of your hearts.”

Kakuzu kisses the corner of his mouth. “You can try.”

They collect another bounty of ten million ryo on their way to the border of the Land of Iron. Hidan is getting back into practice slowly but surely with his body having returned to its normal strength and flexability, even finding ways to work around his lacking depth perception. He makes up for the loss of his scythe with knives, sometimes stealing weapons from their opponents to use them against them. His ulterior motive is finding out how well they suit him. Another scythe would draw too much attention. While Kakuzu is officially dead and is assumed to have vanished with the other Edo Tensei victims, Hidan’s escape from the Nara forest has been found out.

“I could dye my hair again,” Hidan offers.

“Again?”

“Used to do it sometimes back in Yu. Not everyone has silver hair at my age, so it draws attention.” It helped him lie low when he wanted just a few nights of decent rest without worrying about inn owners ratting him out.

Kakuzu agrees and he crosses the border to the Land of Iron with dark brown hair.

“It doesn’t suit you.”

Hidan shrugs. “Doesn’t have to.”

The country’s roads are mostly empty of travellers, only rich merchants with their parades of carts and wares or poor workers on the search for employment. At one point a procession of strange figures struts past them. They’re a dozen people in floor-length robes and pointy hoods, all in white and only dusty from the road. Not even their shoes are visible making them looks like they’re floating over the ground. Their hoods have lines painted on them, imitated an abstract face. Hidan walks backwards for a while to watch them disappear behind a turn in the road.

“There’s supposed to be a cult further north,” Kakuzu explains without Hidan having to prompt him. “They only send missionaries out once a year and like to keep to themselves, but maybe they could be helpful.”

They cross a flat range of mountains. According to a map there is a village on each side of it, so that they can rest before and after the climb. The first night they spend in the first village at the foot of the mountain range where the winds are cool but soft. The innkeeper smiles when Kakuzu asks her about the mountains. “They’re not dangerous, well travelled actually. We bring our dead to the graveyard up there, so they are closer to the heavens. In winter, the road becomes a little rougher but we have never had any accidents since our little village was founded.”

They leave again early in the morning and by noon they have made it to the highest point. A foot of snow has gathered here and the road is barely visible underneath. With the sun high up, travelling still is no problem. Hidan zips his cloak up to the chin, more against the wind than the actual cold. The mountains of the Land of Hot Water are far worse than this. Kakuzu opts to walk on top of the snow, though, leaving only the faintest of footprints. “Show-off.”

From what little Hidan sees of Kakuzu’s face underneath the scarf, he thinks he’s smirking.

“Carry me, bastard.”

“Not after you called me a bastard.”

“Asshole.”

“Keep walking, Hidan.”

“Warm me up later, at least.”

Kakuzu ruffles his hair despite Hidan’s protest and keeps walking ahead of him.

In the afternoon, a snow storm comes up. Harsh freezing winds tear at their clothes and Hidan sinks into even deeper snow. Even as they get over the mountain’s highest point, the weather starts to become really troubling. The cliffs are rougher, the paths nowhere to be found and he simply keeps following Kakuzu’s silhouette against the whiteout, holding on to his sleeve as not to lose him. All his swearing is deafened by the roaring winds.

Then Kakuzu stops. Hidan bumps against his back. “What?”

Words are no use against the wind. Instead Kakuzu steps aside to let Hidan see the poles with red ribbons on them fluttering in the wind. One is right in front of them, the other barely visible behind the wall of snow.

“We’re following them,” Hidan mouths.

Kakuzu nods.

They drag each other further through the snow, from one marked pole to the next. Night must have fallen already. So much for crossing the mountain in a day.

A house comes into view. It’s elevated above the snow and is long enough to span the width of three regular houses. It looks well taken care off, apart from the masses of snow gathering on the roof. The portal above the entrance door shelters them from the worst of the snowstorm as Hidan knocks hard.

A young woman opens them. She has brown skin and dark hair but most of her is wrapped into a blanket. Without another word she just steps aside and gestures them to come inside. The wind becomes background noise, the house built to withstand any storm passing the mountains. They stand in a large entrance hall with another door ot the outside right opposite to the one they came through. A middle ages woman comes from another side door leading further into the living quarters. She too has dark skin and dark hair, bright brown eyes. Hidan assumes the two women are mother and daughter.

“Oh my, we didn’t expect travellers,” the mother says, “But I’m glad you found your way here. Who knows what would have happened if you had stayed outside any longer.”

Hidan stares at her, then at her daughter who unwraps herself from the thick blanket and hangs it on a hook next to the entrace door, and then back at Kakuzu who is the first of the them to answer. “May we stay until the storm calmed down?”

The mother claps her hands. “Of course, of course. This isn’t the first time such a thing happens. We often have visitors here at the shrine. If you wait a little, I can prepare a room for you. Oh, you must be freezing. Mayu, why don’t you make tea?”

The younger woman – she had to be around Hidan’s age, if not even younger - nods and gestures at them to follow her. She leads them into a room only half the size of the entrance hall but still big enough to hold three long tables and a kitchenette stretching along the wall. Two large pots of cold soup are still on the hearth. She points at one of the tables for them to sit down at and gets busy with a tea pot and a box of leaves.

“Hospitable,” Hidan whispers.

Kakuzu doesn’t say anything, his eyes wander over the photographs on the walls. Most of them show travellers that have come through here before but one corner is reserved only to family pictures. Both women are in most, two men, one older and one younger, present in other ones. They’re all smiling. One even shows Mayu’s grandmother and another elderly man who must have been her husband.

Mayu returns with a hot kettle of tea and four cups but doesn’t sit down with them. Instead she makes more gestures and signs with her hands and points at one of the soup pots.

The older woman comes into the room then. “Oh, she is asking if you would like some soup. We still have some left over.”

Hidan exchanges a look with Kakuzu. “I could eat.”

“Wonderful. Mayu, I’ll take care of it. Sit down.”

Mayu sits down next to Hidan but keeps her distance from him while cradling her cup of tea. Once she sets it down again, she signs more gestures at them.

“I have no idea what you want,” Hidan tells her.

Mayu’s mother comes to sit with them, the soup pot slowly heating up now. “She was born mute, you must know,” she says, “She wants to know what brough you up here in the middle of a storm?”

Kakuzu sips at his tea. “We want to cross the mountains. The storm surprised us.”

“It tends to do that,” the woman says, “Oh, I didn’t introduce myself, did I? You can call me Yuri. I own this house. Mayu and I are responsible for taking care of the graves.”

“I see,” Kakuzu says.

“May I ask,” Yuri stars carefully, “Do you happen to come from Takigakure?”

Hidan doesn’t like how chatty she is but Kakuzu continues calmly drinking tea and scanning the photographs on the walls.

“Originally,” Kakuzu answers.

As the soup starts cooking properly, Yuri gets up again but keeps talking. “It’s such a beautiful country, so different from here. The waterfalls are a true beauty of nature.” She swoons, pouring soup into four bowls as Mayu comes over to help her. On her way back to the table she grabs a photograph from the wall and slides it towards Kakuzu.

“Mayu makes delicious soup. Enjoy!”

Hidan pokes at the vegetables but digs in anyways. The first few spoons are still too hot and burn down his throat. It tastes good, better than anything he has had in a long time. Maybe homecooked meals also just taste different from take away food in general.

Yuri keeps talking pointing at the photograph. She, her daughter, the two men and the elderly couple are all in it, smiling softly. The elderly man is the only one without dark skin. “My family is originally from Takigakure as well. My grandmother left the country between wars to settle down in the village at the foot of the mountain. I’m sure you came through there?”

Kakuzu only nods, listening and following Yuri’s finger as she points at the elderly couple in the picture. “Her first husband was an outlaw, you must know. She came here so she could move on and start anew. This is her second husband, my father. His family was in charge of running this place, but now it is mine. They both passed away a couple of years ago. Well. This is my son.” She points at the youngest man in the photograph. He has the same hair and eyes as Mayu. “He went back to Takigakure to follow his dream and become a musician.” She chuckles.

Hidan eats his last spoonful of soup. He feels warmer now and the soup’s spices leave a leftover taste in his mouth that he kind of likes, too.

“What about your husband?”

Yuri laughs. “Oh, he is down in the village to buy new supplies. We recently had a part of the roof break in. After all, our family keeps this place together. Don’t worry, though, the room I prepared for you is safe. No roof will come down on you.”

Hidan smiles out of the little politeness he can manage without making it seem too forced. Kakuzu is better at that anyway, but he still looks down at the photograph.

They finish their evening meal with Yuri chatting away at them, talking about the wholesomeness that gravekeeping holds for her, how it’s wonderful to be someone the dead can rely on to honour their memory. “Both my parents are buried here, so they are never truly gone and I know they are watching over me.”

Hidan retreats back into himself after that.

When Mayu showed them the way to their room and left them alone, Kakuzu tells him “You were unusuallyquiet.”

Hidan shrugs his clothes off, mostly dry now from their time indoors. Yuri set up their futons separately and he pulls them close together, silently wondering if they even need two. “You were unusually chatty,” he replies, “Was her family history really that interesting?”

“Maybe it was to me.” Kakuzu peels himself out of his cloak and drapes it over a chair next to the space heater next to Hidan’s, warm air circulating the air. Once they’re lying down, Hidan cuddles up to him, eyes already falling shut while Kakuzu flips through the booklet.

“You’re actually reading that?”

“You spent money on it, so I might as well not let it go to waste.”

Hidan throws an arm across his chest. “You like me so fucking much.” He falls asleep with Kakuzu’s fingers in his hair and the sound of pages rustling somewhere close to him.

***

Morning comes strangely early and the snowstorm has settled down again. They have breakfast with Yuri and Mayu, the mother still as chatty as the evening before. The photograph is back at its rightful spot on the wall between the others but Kakuzu can’t help but look at it.

“Your mother seems to have been a remarkable woman,” he says.

Yuri smiles softly. “She was. Oh, she was. So hardworking and brave after everything. The story about her first husband.” She sighs. “What a horrible thing. How brave she was for moving on.”

As much as he dislikes hearing it, he has to endure it. “Is it possible for me to see her grave?”

Yuri nods. “Of course. The graveyard is open to everyone who wants to pay their respects. I can show you where she lies.”

Hidan stays behind at the entrance to the graveyard, elevated by a few steps where he can still see over the graves. It’s like an inland lake of the dead. The graves are hidden underneath snow. Yuri takes a broom with her to sweep it off the gravel walks. When they reach their destination she sweeps over the gravestone, too. It’s a simple one with barely any decorations or needless curls in the letters.

Yuri lights an incense and offers Kakuzu to do the same.

He does.

The smell is sweet and sickening. Yuri sweeps the snow off the grave next to it and lights one there too.

“I’m glad they are here together,” she says, “They got to live long fulfilled lives, despite everything, and in the end, what more can we wish for, right? If you excuse me, I’ll finish this up.” With that she goes on with sweeping the gravel walks and leaves him alone.

Kimiko, the gravestone says. She only died four years ago from old age. In the photographs she looked happy and content with a new husband and children of her own. He’s seen her for the first time in decades. Back then she was so much younger. A lot changed about her and a lot stayed the same.

A lot changed about him and a lot stayed the same.

He sighs despite himself, and makes his way back to Hidan who awaits him, leaning against the entrance gate to the graveyard. “What took you so long?”

“I’ll tell you later. We’re leaving.” He turns to Mayu. “Thank you for your hospitality.”

Mayu smiles, nods and signs something before waving them off.

The climb down is easier, the road more visible in the light of day and without a storm slowing them down. Halfway down Hidan catches up to him as the snow subsides and gives way to a solid road again. He holds on to Kakuzu’s sleeve, still. Tugs at it. “You forgot your suitcase.”

Kakuzu nods. “I know.”

Hidan raises a brow. “Let’s go back and get it. All your – our money is in there.”

“It’s fine, Hidan.”

“What?”

“I said it’s fine. I saved enough to last us until we captured another bounty.”

“Whatever you say.”

***

Hidan doesn’t understand it at all but he also sees little sense in talking to Kakuzu about it without it ending in a dull argument. If Kakuzu wants to give his money away to any family that’s friendly enough to even greet them, then so he should.

At the other village it is warmer, less windy, and everyone seems friendly even here. They ask merchants about any religious groups in the area and the country. The only one they get information about is the one that they’ve already seen missionaries of.

“It’s further north,” Kakuzu says when they return to their inn, “We’ll figure out if they have any beliefs in immortality.”

“Okay.” Hidan wolfs down his dinner. “And if it’s not them-”

“We’ll keep looking,” Kakuzu states, “Some religion, some cult, someone has to have an explanation for your immortality, and once we figured that out, we can think about ways to kill you.”

They make love that night, Hidan has no other word to describe it. It’s more gentle than any of the times before, no matter how much he begs for it to hurt. Kakuzu prepares him carefully, utterly refusing to make it painful in any way. It’s scary in how unused Hidan is to it but he can’t find it in himself to dislike it. His fingers digging into Kakuzu’s back when the pure pleasure, unsoiled by pain, overwhelms him are the most violent part of it. When it’s over he keeps himself wrapped around Kakuzu, doesn’t want to let go and pulls him down for one deep kiss after the other until it leaves them both too breathless to continue.

Clean again and dozing off against Kakuzu’s shoulder he only listens to the familiar rustle of pages being turned. “What brought this on?”

“What?”

“You’re never so… so...” He makes a tired hand gesture. “Don’t tell me you’re turning into a – what did you call it? - peace-loving fool.”

When he doesn’t get an answer, he pries his eyes open and is faced with Kakuzu looking down at him with that unreadable expression of his.

“What?”

“We were made from war, Hidan. There is no changing that anymore.”

“I guess you’re right,” Hidan mumbles, “Hey, what about that grave thing yesterday? You said you’d tell me about it.”

“I closed a chapter of my life, that is all.”

Hidan opens and closes his mouth a few times before settling down on his shoulder again. He tries to piece it together himself, mentally going over everything their hostess told them about the place. “Oh.”

“Figured it out?”

“Mh-hm. I think.” His words become slurred from how tired he is. “You’re so fucking soft sometimes, ‘Kuzu.”

When he falls asleep it’s with the realisation that he hasn’t had nightmares in a long time.


	22. Chapter Twenty-Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The last chapter that I finally got to write.  
> I powered through this and the last one in one go but I'm content with the way everything turned out. Also the timejumps are going wild in this one.  
> Enjoy!

The north of the Land of Iron is home to the cult called the disciples of Dunduruun. It’s a small shrine, inhabited by only a few dozen people, located on top of another mountain and overlooking the valleys underneath. A few houses, all of the same size, built a close community with its people all wearing the white ropes and hoods concealing their faces and bodies whole. Like a tiny village of ghosts they go quietly about their day when Hidan and Kakuzu enter. They don’t even stop once, ignoring the newcomers.

Hidan sticks to Kakuzu’s side. “They smell like nothing.” Only the snow and trees have any scent up here. “Freaks.”

With all the people looking the same, it’s hard to say if there even is something like a leader or a high priest. There aren’t even any idols to worship. It’s an entirely undecorated shrine if Hidan has ever seen one. They walk up to an elevated area where three massive bells are suspended a few feet into the air, tightly secured to not move in the wind. They are old but well taken care off. Hidan reaches out for them.

A hooded figure blocks him by bringing one long sleeve into his way. The cloth is heavy with concealed weapons, Hidan can smell them.

“Outsiders are forbidden from touching the sanctuaries,” a man’s voice says sternly. Hidan draws his hand back.

“What is this religion even about?”  
The hooded man moves his head, the markings over where his face should be barely indicated where he is actually looking. “Have you come to join our ways?”

“We’ve come to learn about it,” Kakuzu replies.

The hooded man bows his head and holds out his arm again into the direction of one of the buildings. The sleeves are long enough ot even hide his hands. The building they enter is built minimalistically with more focus on functionality. The floors, walls and ceilings are painted in all white, any paintings on the walls are monochrome and abstract.

“Dunduruun is the deity of our shrine,” the hooded man begins, “They are benevolent and grant us prosperity in these rough lands. Theirs is the winter and the spring, the snow and the buds. However, they were chased from this world a long time ago by their sibling deity, Saisiruun, god of summer and autumn.”

“What about the bells?” Hidan asks.

Through a window they are still visible, unmoved when the winds become stronger.

“Dunduruun might be exiled but they shall return and on that day the bells shall toll to signify their return. Until then we, their followers, will spread word about their benevolence and commit ourselves to them with mind, body and soul.”

Hidan suppresses the urge to cringe at that, barely hiding it by instead trying to make sense of one of the abstract paintings. “You don’t happen to know any myths about immortality?”

The hooded man shakes his head. “Only Dunduruun and Saisiruun are immortal and impossible to kill by any weapon or poison. They may grant a person a longer life but we know of no cases of such a thing ever having happened.”

Hidan exchanges a look with Kakuzu.

“Then how do you know about it being possible?” Kakuzu asks.

“It is written in the holy scriptures of our shrine. They date back thousands of years.”

“This isn’t getting us any further,” Hidan groans.

“Patience,” Kakuzu tells him before turning back to the hooded man, “Do you know anything about the cult of Jashin that originated in Yugakure?”

The hooded man doesn’t say anything for a moment, his hidden face making it hard to know what he’s thinking about. Hidan doesn’t like it in the slightest. Eventually the man sighs. “We do not talk about heathenistic gods. Do you really intend to join the ways of Dunduruun?”

“Never said we did,” Hidan says.

“Well, I must ask you to leave.”

“A last question,” Kakuzu says, “Where do we find the cult of Saisiruun?”

Hidan catches the glint of metal under the hooded man’s sleeve and catches the knife with his hand, the blade stabbing right through his palm and digging through to the hilt before it even comes close to Kakuzu. The pain is nothing he can’t handle, nonetheless he clenches his teeth and pushes back. The hooded man is shoved against the closest wall, lets go of the knife and Hidan pulls it out to cut through the robe and the hood where he thinks the man’s throat to be. Whatever he eventually hits, bleeds enough to kill him and drenches the white clothes in all red.

“Fucking asshole.” He kicks the dead man in the chest for good measure.

“You just got us in trouble,” Kakuzu comments.

“He attacked you!”

“He won’t be the only one. They’ll be after us.”

Hidan’s hand heals in a matter of moments and he wipes the remaining blood on the hooded man’s robe. “So? We kill them, easy as that.” He’s craving the bloodshed, the act of killing, holding a weapon to kill with.

He gets what he wants, bathing all of Dunduruun’s grounds in the blood of their followers. White robes turning red. It’s a slaughter like he has done them before, when they hunted down the jinchuriki, when they collected the monk’s bounty in the Land of Fire.

He buries knives in bodies, slices throats and crushes faces to the ground until they bleed from their mouths. Kakuzu lets him rain down chaos on his own, watching him kill until he is satisfied. Until no one is left standing and his own clothes are drenched in a mix of blood that is his own and strangers’.

They find the cult of Saisiruun after a week’s travel to the east. The people there walk around without clothes and have shaved their heads, their skin coated in dark red paint from head to toe. They don’t have a leader figure as well, no figures of their gods, and they keep to themselves. There are no bells at their shrine.

Saisiruun reigns over summer and autumn, granting health and taking it away again. Immortality is against their being, being bent on shortening everything to the smallest a thing can be. The people at the shrine are young, the oldest still being younger than thirty and already preparing to die. They look at Kakuzu with disdain and that’s enough of a reason for Hidan to kill them too, their red body paint being replaced by blood and iron.

The Land of Iron holds only few cults of its own. Most religions here have their roots in the surrounding countries and others are too young to hold any merit, worshipping weirdly formed rocks or trees with unusually coloured leaves. Some of them believe that immortality can be achieved while others look down on the mere suggestion of it. Those who believe in it regard it as something great and almost desirable.

After a months they finally cross the border into the Land of Sound and leave behind blood-drenched earth and death. They keep low for a while, stay undiscovered and away from the roads until they crossed half the country. The roots of Hidan’s hair have regrown silver a while ago and when they spent money on an inn again he lets Kakuzu cut the dyed parts away. He hates the feeling of having his hair so short. Especially in winter it’s colder that way and he doesn’t like the feeling of it when Kakuzu drives his fingers through it while reading.

“It will grow again,” Kakuzu reassures him.

Hidan sighs, straddles his lap and finds a strand of Kakuzu’s hair to play with. “Never thought I’d get jealous of you.”

“You are charming as ever.”

Hidan takes Kakuzu’s face between his hands and plants a kiss on his lips. “And you are fucking hot, did I ever tell you that?” He kisses him more with Kakuzu accepting and reciprocating but not going any further.

“I can’t read like this,” he says when Hidan has dragged his hands down his chest and fumbles to open the front of his trousers.

He stops. “What? Is it more interesting than this?”

Kakuzu only gives him another kiss, meant to be reassuring and final at the same time. “As a matter of fact, it is.”

He is still holding the book in his hand, his thumb between the pages as a bookmark. Hidan rolls his eyes. “You’ve been reading those for days. Are holy scriptures really that interesting?”

“For our cause, they are.” Hidan was vaguely aware of Kakuzu collecting all scriptures and old books he could find at whatever shrine they were at while Hidan took care of the killing. Since Dunduruun he’s been reading every time they rest, during their midday breaks and until late into the night.

“Have you found anything yet at least?”

Kakuzu shakes his head. “I’m still hoping that we will find out more once we are in Yugakure again.”

“Okay. I’m hoping that too.” He presses a few more kisses under Kakuzu’s jaw and down his throat before lifting off and settling into his usual spot at his side.

The mountains of the Land of Hot Water are more familiar to him than he likes, even more so when all the memories come rushing back into his mind and he has to push them all down to concentrate on the way they need to take.

Looking at a map of the land he notices that his old home and the Jashinist cult weren’t even that far apart from each other, only separated by a few mountains and two days of travelling. They search the burnt down remains of his village first. Hidan doesn’t remember the last time he has been here, only the state it’s been in when he survived being killed for the first time. Some houses are entirely missing, the foundations of some still marking where streets used to be. None of the basements are intact anymore and what little they dig out that isn’t smashed is only broken furniture and old, dented kettles. Books and clothes were either burnt with the village or eaten by worms.

Hidan digs out a small chest but only finds old letters and a pair of golden earrings in it. The latter he hands over to Kakuzu to sell later but the letters are uninteresting and about nothing and no one. Searching the village more, he comes to a realisation that makes him stop what he’s doing and just stare down the road.

“I don’t know which one is mine.”

Kakuzu looks up from the findings he’s made. “Hm?”

“I don’t know where I used to live here.” Maybe his house used to be one of the ruins that are left, maybe it is gone entirely and swallowed by the earth. He doesn’t know. He’s supposed to know. You’re supposed to remember such things but he doesn’t.

It doesn’t end there.

“I don’t know what anyone looked like.”

The cult of Jashin was nestled in between the cliffs of two mountains, only little vegetation feeding the small village and unruly roads leading up to it. Hidan remembers this better. It’s fresher in his memory. The small huts with only the most necessary furniture and utensils. The area with the underground chambers, boulders on top of the entrances like gravestones of their own. Even the cell is still in the spot he remembers it being. The only thing that changed is that the bars are gone now and it’s nothing more than a tiny cave in the rocks. When he thinks about it too much, he thinks he can still make out dried splotches of his own blood that was spilt there.

At one spot in the middle of the village they find a heap of metal, tips of lances, dirt syringes and rusty bowls like the one they made him drink all their blood from.

The air is heavier here, he thinks, the sky greyer, the moon red when it rises.

They spend the night away from the village, in a cave further up the mountain where they can look down on it. For some reason, Hidan almost expects fires to light up there and the village to come to life.

“What did they tell you about Jashin?” Kakuzu asks.

“He’s supposed to be the god of death,” Hidan says slowly, “As his followers they are supposed to bring death upon everything and everyone and for that purpose alone they are to be made immortal. They thought I was lucky to have been chosen for that duty.” He rolls onto his back to look at the stars, Kakuzu in his peripheral vision is still deciphering the scriptures of all the cults they came across. He thinks he can taste blood and smoke in the air. “I want to die.”

“We’ll get there.”

“They said something like… something like me being the one to witness all the death in the world until it ends.”

“Do you think it could be true?”

Hidan sighs. “I hope it’s not. The end of the world… I don’t want to live that long.”

It seems like a long, long time will pass until it becomes true, until something happens that extincts all living beings – humans, animals, plants. From what little Hidan knows about the world’s history it feels like it just started and is nowhere near its end yet. He wonders if there even is a history left when people die out and only animals roam the world, and decides that he doesn’t want to think about that at all. “Hey, Kakuzu?”

“Hm?”

“If… if it’s really true and I live until the end of time, you’ll stay alive with me, right?”

He doesn’t get an answer immediately, only when he looks at Kakuzu because yes, such things are better said when looking at each other. “I’ll make sure to die last.”

Hidan smiles. “Thanks.”

They don’t find anything more in the cult’s village. It’s empty and devoid of anything that could have potentially been helpful. Within just a few years nothing is left of the place that Hidan spent months in. He doesn’t miss it, can’t bring himself to even try and muster up any feelings of missing it or regretting to leave.

They find other religions and cults all over the world. In the big five countries at the center, the smaller ones in between. There are people that believe in the possibility of immortality, some even base it on a combination of science and jutsu. It’s interesting even, to an extent, but not helpful in finding out what made Hidan the way he is. They travel even further, through the smallest, most hidden villages within the outer borders of the Land of Earth, through the Lands of Claws and Fangs. They go through mountains, cross inland seas, and make their way through the Land of Demons. Hidan doesn’t say it out loud but he hoped to find an answer here.

They don’t, however, the land is like any other they have come through. It’s a wasteland with dark skies and full of vulcanoes, only a small number of people living in these infamous conditions.

They make their way to the Land of Swamps, searching every corner of the map for any religions, cults and believers in any concepts of death.

The journeys are never without any occurances. Often times a cult will discover their invulnerability and try to capture them. Hidan finds himself fighting even more than in any war or during his time as an Akatsuki member. Together with Kakuzu he slaughters entire communities, spills blood on any ground he steps a foot on and drenched himself in it. He tastes death in his throat, in the air and in the water, on Kakuzu and feels it around him even in his dreams.

Success doesn’t come.

Achieving immortality is impossible.

Achieving flawless immortality is impossible.

One day an immortal will die of old age. One day their wounds will no longer heal. If an immortal stops believing in the gods that gave it to them, they would die.

Hidan has stopped believing in gods entirely.

“What if that’s it?” he asks Kakuzu on their way back through one of the smaller countries between the swamps and the Land of Demons. “If I believe in no one, then there’s also no one to help me.”

Kakuzu waves it off. “We’ll try the east next.”

There are more countries to the east. They travel to the Land of the Sea, across the ocean and through the crescent kingdom of the Moon island. There the people speak of water deities slumbering deep in the ocean, priesters tell of fishmen that outlive any human and believe that oceans underneath the oceans will be the last harbours of humanity, the place for any dead souls to go. An afterlife.

“Afterlife?” Throughout all their travels there has been talk of afterlives. Sometimes it’s up in the skies, plains like heavens where people’s souls will last forever and spend the rest of time in eternal bliss and happiness. It’s something most beliefs have in common, a painless afterlife where there is nothing but happiness. Sometimes there are hells, places for sinners to go. “I don’t know about this.”

“Jashin’s cult has never talked about it?”

Hidan leans back and lets one hand dangle into the water splashing around their boat. “When people die their souls will go to Jashin, is what they said. He is the god and having a place near him is something good.” For the longest time he believed that Jashin watched over him, sent him out to bring more people into his embrace so that, at last, he would be embraced too. Now Hidan doesn’t know where he would go anymore. The concepts of afterlives, of hells are too different from each other to paint a clear picture but the quantity of such similar beliefs is also enough to make its existence almost plausible. Like in different languages, words are different but mean the same.

“So the Jashinist’s concept of a heaven would simply be a person,” Kakuzu says and writes something down. He has taken to keep notebooks whenever they find something new that could potentially help them. Hidan tried to read them but they’re messes of scribbled notes, disjointed from their original context, and only Kakuzu can make sense of them at all.

“I don’t know what I think of this, of an afterlife,” Hidan goes on, “I don’t know if I like it.”

“You’ve sinned quite a lot according to most religions. If anything, you would go to hell.” Kakuzu finishes his note and stores his notebook back in his bag. “Me too.”

Hidan scowls. “Hell is supposed to be punishment but...” He trails off. Flashes of the things he has seen at seven years old run through his head, and he just looks at Kakuzu for a while to ground himself again. “I think it can’t really be worse than this world, you know? I imagine it’s like, it’s like war and I’ve seen that. You’ve seen that. You’ve seen even more of it than me.”

“There’s always something worse,” Kakuzu says and leaves it at that, “I think the thing about hell is that it would last forever. But wars end.”

“And then they start again.”

“They end again.”

Hidan pokes at Kakuzu’s shoulder. “If I didn’t know better I’d say that you really sound like you’re becoming a peace-loving fool.” Kakuzu lets him do the killing most of the time by now, and Hidan is getting even better at it. He almost can’t believe that there used to be a time where he thought he already reached his maximum potential. While it is impossible for him to learn any ninjutsu, he’s deadly with any weapon and his body’s self-healing capabilities allow him to use such a high level of strength that would shatter any normal person’s bones. Meanwhile the range of Kakuzu’s ability only changes when he replaces a heart. At one point Hidan convinced him to take his. The process hurt like nothing else but something Hidan always survives. The heart proved useless to Kakuzu, all the abilities Hidan has not manifesting at all.

“I lived through four wars, Hidan,” Kakuzu says, “I will live through more.”

“ _We_ will live through more.”

“Of course.”

Hidan splashes water in Kakuzu’s direction just to tease him but doesn’t get any other response than just a frown. “Will we take sides? Just for the hell of it, I mean.”

Kakuzu signs some seals and drenches Hidan with a conjured torrent of water. “We take the side that makes us money.”

Hidan spits a mouthful of water at him.

When they return to the Land of Fire again, two years have passed by. New groups have formed, new leaders have been appointed, the countries change. There are new beliefs to be discovered in the hopes that one of them might finally be the right one.

Ten years go by. They are busy travelling, the world and its people ever changing. New gods come into being and vanish again. Hidan teases Kakuzu for turning one hundred years old in that time only for the realisation of how much time that is to crash down on him. They stay up that night, tangled up in each other and not letting go.

Twenty years still leave them with no progress. New wars start all around them, between the small countries and the big ones, everyone trying to get each other’s territories, each other’s new weapon, each other’s secret techniques. At the same time the first train tracks are built throughout the continent, connecting everything with a web of rails. Smoke puffing monsters ride the tracks, carrying people across long distances at a pace that no one thought possible before.

Fifty years and Kumogakure builds its first skyscraper as though anything it has built before wasn’t one. But this one reaches high into the clouds and even beyond, so ridiculously high it becomes useless since no person can breathe so far up in the air. But Hidan still climbs it. He thinks he can see all of the world from so far up, can make out the curve of the globe and see into space without the light pollution. The way down is easier than up, he lets himself free fall and lands in a puddle of his own smashed guts and crashed bones. It hurts. Hurts more than anything before, but when he comes to again Kakuzu is there with him and doesn’t waste time to immediately start scolding him on needing a new eye prothesis.

With the skyscrapers come giant weapons of mass destruction entirely working through science. Hidan doesn’t know which war it is that he and Kakuzu first see them in action. It’s no battlefield that the bombs hit but an area between the new borders of new countries where people live and go about their lives. They watch it happen from afar. A giant flaming ball erupting in the center of a small village and the pressure wave tears them from their feet and crushes their bones. Hidan heals, Kakuzu’s body puts itself together again. Fire swallows everything in a miles-wide radius around the center of the detonation. Hidan grins at it, lets the heat wash over his face and watches the light of it shine in Kakuzu’s eyes.

What stays is a large pillar of smoke, a mushroom cloud looming over wide stretches of the land like a giant reminder of what has just taken place. Everything in the area is dead or dying.

Hidan makes sure to be close to the center of detonation the next time such a bomb hits. It tears him apart, burns and crushes him but he finds himself still alive by the end of it when the world around him has cooled down again and Kakuzu stitches his remains back together so he can heal.  
“Fucking hell,” Hidan mutters once he’s regenerated enough to speak again. His face pulls itself into a grinning grimace. “Shit, that was-”  
“Enlightening?” Kakuzu offers.

“Something like that, yeah.” The pain is still fresh and clinging to all parts of his body. When his skull and face have repaired themselves again, Kakuzu gives him back his glass eye that he kept for protection.

“It didn’t kill you.”

For the first time in a century Hidan thinks about all the ways he has died so far. Thinks about the ways other people have died. “Deidara would have loved this for me.”

Kakuzu pats his shoulder and watches over him while he heals well enough to be able to stand up again.

Another century later the bombs become more massive and the world more peaceful. That isn’t to say that there is no more war but the countries came into agreements to not use their bomb arsenals on each other to protect as many lives as possible. Hidan thinks they’re hypocrites. As though killing people with smaller weapons is in any way morally superior. Though, as someone wielding weapons and getting used to firearms more and more, he doesn’t have the right to complain, really.

They keep looking for new religions, cults and sects. They sprout from the earth like nothing else and vanish just as quickly, sometimes completely wiped out and crossed from memory when Kakuzu lets Hidan kill them all. He doesn’t even need a reason for spilling blood anymore. Once a religion proved useless, the world is better off with it gone.

“What if the cult of Jashin was right?” Hidan proposes one night when they’re staying at a military base somewhere in the deserts of what used to be Sungakure. It’s only inhabited by corpses and the two of them, the smell of blood lingering in the air to be carried away by the breeze.

Kakuzu is reading and Hidan almost admires how he hasn’t grown tired of this hobby of his after all this time. He’s been collecting books of all sorts, anything religious that he can study. Hidan even started to help him work through it all. There are weeks during which they stay in whatever secluded living quarters they’ve found and spend their time reading through any books they discovered on their travels. It’s quiet nights and rustling pages, too peaceful to be comfortable for Hidan but nice all the same because Kakuzu is next to him and not going anywhere.

“If they were right, the world would need to end for you to finally die.”

Hidan props his chin up, absent-mindedly tracing Kakuzu’s stitches on his chest before catching the other’s gaze and kissing him. It’s something he doesn’t grow tired off either and he’s amazed how they can still stand being around each other. Even when they are annoyed with each other, have argued or full-on fought each other with everything they had, they always stayed together anyway. When he pulls away, he smiles. “We can give it all a little push, right?”  
  


They spend years planning for it. Well, Kakuzu does the planning and Hidan carries it out. They steal blueprints, building layouts, schedules of every kind. They figure out the hot spots of current wars to predict where else it might settle.

By now Kakuzu is only one of few people who are still familiar with using jutsu of any kind. With technology improving and people no longer having to rely on draining their chakra there soon was no use for teaching them any longer. Hidan always loves seeing Kakuzu use them anyway. It’s like a call back to a different time, almost a different life. They have outlived anyone from their childhoods, from the first few wars, and now their lives will go on forever until no one else is left anymore.

They start with poison in the water. Smaller villages die out immediately, medical help not arriving in time for rescueing anyone from such an unexpectant happening. The cities hold up better. People fall sick in the streets and hospitals become over saturated, leaving patients in the hallways. Most people survive for a while, fight for their lives against the poison in their body but eventually succumb to it. Only rarely does anyone live through it entirely.

People die.

Their governments blame other countries and they argue back and forth with other countries becoming their moderators. They become the next targets of any poison attack. Hidan doesn’t love it, prefers to kill with his own hands, getting bloody and surrounding himself with the battle but this is no longer just about his pleasure. He finally has something to work towards and it’s everything he can hold onto.

It takes years until the first country actually disregards all prior agreements and casts aside any morals to launch missiles.

It’s the most beautiful war Hidan has ever taken part in. Kakuzu and him take part in most battles, showing up where they happen and killing the soldiers on all side. They infiltrate sickbays, kill the nurses, they poison any food supplies to be send to other battlefields.

Small countries are quickly being annexed to reap more soldiers, leaving behind only sick people and children. New plagues start.

All past ages of honour and peace-making are over now and will never return again. It’s a new age of death and destruction with no room left for peace-loving idealists.

Kakuzu doesn’t show it as much but from the glint in his eyes, from the way his movements flow in battle, Hidan knows that he’s revelling in it just as much as him.

They’re made from war, built for war, and this is their age. Their enemies are plenty and they sleep between bled-out corpses and burning buildings.

Hidan doesn’t keep track of the world’s population. The poison leads to decade long pandemics and makes wildlife die out. Food becomes scarce and people flee to the big cities, all huddled together in one spot. Most of them still make war with each other, sending troops to fight in the streets, rockets to wipe out civilians, snipers to take out any officials they can find.

Humanity is destroying itself along with the environment and all the things that live in it. The oceans slowly succumb to pollution, killing any fish and mammals living in it, while deserts spread across the land.

Everywhere the air becomes too thick to breathe, clean air becomes a luxury barely anyone can obtain. Radiation reigns prominent across the world, craters of bombs even visible from outer space if one wants to trust the few news stations that are still around and report on nothing but the war.

The stench of death is omnipresent now and wherever they show up it becomes final and suffocating.

The last city falls after centuries of the same war. Hidan doesn’t remember time anymore, the seasons have become arbitrary, the way years are being counted has been forgotten completely. The seventy years Kakuzu has on him are nothing anymore. Hidan tries to remember the people he has known back then, a long, long time ago. An eternity past. He tries to remember their faces, their names, their actions.

He tries to remember gods but the only one he still knows is Jashin, a god he doesn’t believe in any longer and yet still does his bidding. He kills, murders, slaughters any survivor he and Kakuzu come across without mercy. When they’re all gone, then maybe, maybe he can finally die too.

“We are almost done,” Kakuzu says far in the future. The years don’t have names anymore, no numbers, nothing to tell them apart. Time is fluent now and stagnant at the same time. They’re on top of a hill, overlooking a small valley that they know hides a bunker underground. After it there would only be two more left. The bunkers hold the last of anything. The last plants and animals to feed the people inside. They could simply wait for them to starve but Hidan wants to hurry.

“We’re so close,” he says. He’s so close to dying as never before. “I want this to be over. We’re so fucking close.”

The bunker holds only a few dozen people, a quick slaughter, and blood is pooling on the concrete floors. They kill the animals too and then light the whole place on fire.

The second bunker is the same but they have kept some weapons on them too. On their way inside people with machine guns kill two of Kakuzu’s hearts. Hidan makes sure their deaths are especially painful and lets them suffer before the finishing blow to their throats, blood covering his own face and clothes. He has stopped caring for that a long time ago. All of him is drenched in blood and death and dirt and so is all of Kakuzu. They’re bound together by war and bloodshed and everything ugly.

The last bunker doesn’t know it’s the last. They kill everyone inside like they have done countless times before. Between the two of them they don’t even know anymore who killed more people and the longer Hidan thinks about it, while his body moves on its own cutting through people and mowing them down, he realises he never knew to begin with. By now they share their body counts and it’s irrelevant.

With his dying breath a father sends his daughter to look for other survivors. It’s a little girl, barely ten years old, and she runs. Her feet sink into the desert sands surrounding the bunker as she struggles forward with tears streaming down her eyes. Kakuzu kills the father as Hidan chases after her. Shortly after her little body bleeds out into the sand.

Their last moments are only for themselves, away from any corpses, away from the last fires. They walk away from it all in silence but Hidan can’t help but smile to himself. It stretches across his face so broadly that it almost hurts. He thinks he recognises the mountains they end up in and finally laughter breaks out of him as he slings his arms around Kakuzu’s shoulders and hold him tight. They’re both drenched in death but just for now they only exist for each other and nobody else. Hidan laughs into Kakuzu’s shoulder and when he calms down again he still can’t stop grinning even while pressing kisses up Kakuzu’s throat. Kakuzu holds him tight, captures his lips and kisses him deep and rough and in exactly the way Hidan wants him to.

“We did it,” he eventually whispers between kisses, “We fucking did it.”

Kakuzu leans their foreheads together and for a while they just breathe each other, ignoring all the blood, death and dirt around them. There is nobody left but the two of them. Hidan thinks he could never get tired of having Kakuzu with him, around him, right there in front of him, and millenia prove that he is right with that assumption. Kakuzu has always been with him and he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“We did it,” Kakuzu says too.

Hidan nods and kisses him again. This time it’s to distract himself from the prickling in his eyes, the salt he tastes on his own lips and the wetness on his cheeks washing away the grime.

“Are you okay with this?” Kakuzu asks when they separate again but still don’t let go of each other.

Hidan nods again but has to swallow his sniffling. “I’m okay. But you’re the one who-”

“I’ve been prepared for this for a long time now. I knew we would eventually end up here.”

Hidan knows. He has seen Kakuzu collect any information he could find about the Edo Tensei to finally release himself when the time had come.

It has come now. He watches him sign the seals and thinks he sees an aura leave Kakuzu’s body. Back then he hadn’t died to begin with, so now he is back to his human form, three hearts beating in his chest. He releases the two last masks.

Hidan takes a deep breath, tears making his vision blurry, but he has to pull himself together for just a little longer. They each kill a mask creature. Hidan flinches at the pained sounds Kakuzu makes because of it but the beasts die in front of him and then the two of them own the last beating hearts in the world.

“Wherever- wherever we go, I’ll find you, right?”

Kakuzu takes Hidan’s hands between his to help him steady his weapon. His hands are rough and heavily but warm and calming in the way they touch him. “You’ll find me,” he promises.

Hidan nods, more for himself than anyone else. “I’ll find you. Yeah, I’ll find you.”

The act of killing is nothing strange to him. It’s more familiar than anything else. Hidan has known bloodshed ever since he can remember and he has become good at it.

His blade pierces a heart.

Around them the world is ending.

Hidan holds onto Kakuzu tightly, feeling his blood seep onto his skin, fresh and warm, but his breathing becoming flatter.

A last breath.

Hidan buries his face between his neck and shoulder and cries. His eye stings from the tears washing away the dirt from his face, leaving tracks he won’t ever lay eyes on. He keeps holding onto Kakuzu and feels his skin cool underneath his fingers. He keeps holding him because there is nothing else for him to do anymore.

Around him the world has ended.

He can barely see through his own tears, doesn’t want to because there is nothing for him to see anymore. Nothing but an empty world. He’s the last thing left on this giant, lifeless, floating rock, just a speck of dust in the universe. He doesn’t know how long he has been holding Kakuzu but he still keeps holding him.

Hell and an afterlife aren’t things he wants. He wants something else and wherever he would go he wants Kakuzu to be there with him again.

Something grants it to him.

Believing in gods is hard when he can’t see anyone, when there was no one in the world who knew about anything. Gods aren’t real but whether they are or not stops being important.

From one moment to the other Hidan is aware that his immortality is gone. His body catches up to a long time of starvation and millenia of mortal wounds. Dying is quick that way.

He loses strength in his limbs, slowly sinking to the ground but refusing to let himself be separated from Kakuzu. Breathing becomes hard, then impossible. His heart begins to race only to die down into weak, flat beats.

Then everything is calm, everything is quiet. There’s a last soft breeze carressing him softly.

One final time, Hidan falls asleep to never wake up again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you everyone who read until this point. I hope you enjoyed the read and feel free to let me know what you think, comments are always welcome!  
> This is the end of this fic. I started it pretty impulsively a little over a month ago and it didn't want to leave my head until I wrote all of it down and here we are. It was an interesting journey for me. I did quite a lot of research into Naruto lore just to disregard most of it again. I still feel that Hidan and Kakuzu are pretty underrated characters in canon and while this fic wasn't an attempt to fix anything really (I took a whole lot of liberties after all) I still had to get it off my chest.  
> Fun fact: none of them actually said "I love you" at any point asdhgaks  
> I don't have anything eloquent to say anymore, so just again: thank you for reading! <3


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